Whilst it’s looking quite miserable outside of my window today, I’d say we’ve been having a quite nice summer this year. The weather’s generally been sunny and whilst it has been hot, there’s only a few days where I’ve wanted to move to the Arctic Circle. Living in the UK having anything that comes close to a consistently nice summer comes as quite a shock, I expect sudden snap downpours from a sky that was blue only minutes earlier.
Luckily I’ve been putting this nice weather to good use, in the form of exercise. Realising that I can’t go through my entire life in my present rotund status I’m making an attempt at running to try and shed some pounds. I’m certainly feeling fitter than I was before I started, and I’m convinced that I’ve dropped a little weight as well. These are all good things, but getting out and about is taking even more time away from my already limited gaming time.
Maybe this goes some way to explain the summer lull in gaming. I know that games are getting spread out over the year from the previous ‘let’s release everything at Christmas’ situation, but do publishers really want stuff to come out when people’s thoughts are turning to sunning themselves all day, or partying on the beach?
Of course you can come at this from the other direction, kids are free from school. Every year dozens of movies capitalize on the fact that kids are free, resulting in the wealth of summer blockbusters that come out in the summer months. Currently showing at the Odeon in Brighton are Shrek Forever After, Toy Story 3, Cats and Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore, Inception, Karate Kid, The A-Team, Twilight: Eclipse and The Tooth Fairy. Whilst I’m not sure Inception will appeal to kids on their break from school, every other title has a core audience between five and fifteen.
I think all of these films show that there’s clearly a market to put out a blockbuster title in the summer, but gaming hasn’t come anywhere near to this. By my reckoning we’ve had three ‘bigish’ releases over the past month (Starcraft II, Crackdown 2 and LEGO: Harry Potter). Compared to the wealth of movie releases over roughly the same period are publisher’s missing a trick?
Maybe it’s the fact that games are a much longer proposition than a film. With a film you go to a nice cool room, sit down for about three hours at the absolute most and you’re done. I played three hours of Assassin’s Creed II yesterday and I don’t feel I’ve done much more than scrape the surface of the story and potential for exploration. Perhaps people don’t really like a long term investment of time during the summer months, they want to be able to go and do a variety of different things.
What seems really odd is that just as the summer period draws to a close in September we have Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions (a relatively big title) and Halo: Reach (certainly one of the biggest titles this year) launching, both of which are bound to have pretty large markets in the school age market. The same school age kids would have been free to buy and play those games all they want just a month earlier, but releasing them in September all but guarantees that a large chunk of the market will be back in school. Where’s the logic in that?
Without a doubt the positioning of E3 wrecks at least sum of the summer for many games, and pushes a large number firmly into the ‘holiday’ release window. Whilst we all love seeing the titles on display at E3, many people forget the real purpose of the show. Publishers need retailers to stock their games in large quantities if they’re going to be a success, so at E3 they try and convince every possible retailer that if they stock the game it’ll just fly off the shelves.
However if you’re releasing close to E3 how are you going to convince them? There’s barely any time left before your game needs to ship, so you basically have to convince them to order the game right there and then; not an easy task. If you release a few months after E3 then it’s a much easier sale, they’ve got time to go back and research whether your game fits the image and demographic of their stores.
Even if you’ve got it into retail outlets around E3, every press outlet is tied up for the whole of June with covering E3 and the aftermath. Sad as it is there simply isn’t enough time for anyone to review every single title at the best of times, if almost all of your staff are covering E3 they’re not going to have time to cover whatever the new release is. If you look at release schedules you can see the clear effect of E3 on what’s coming out, it’s normally only titles like the Sims that take the risk as they basically have guaranteed sales.
So is there a solution for the summer lull? Not really, but who cares? Catch up with those games you missed when pretty much every week between November and March had a triple-A title releasing. Go play in a field. Visit the beach and have a nice swim, I promise you Britain’s beaches aren’t as bad as the press try to make out sometimes. Use the longer days and party later into the night. Enjoy yourself, gaming isn’t everything.
Dexter17
You’ve just doomed us all by saying that we’re having a nice summer in the first paragraph :-)
cc_star
We’ve had about 3 weeks of grey skies & occasional rain, business as usual round these here parts
rht992
we were flooded at work and the roof fell in because of the rain water building up. this was made even worse by the fact it fell on me head.
aerobes
Lol, by all means, come and live in the Lake District, Its rained pretty much consistently for 3 weeks and yet we are blessed with a hosepipe ban, I know the majority of the water water that falls in our area is piped to Manchester but apparently we are receiving the wrong type of rain to fill the reserves … uhhh, yeah, sure.
On topic, I feel the lull is an absolute blessing to be honest, its been a golden period in my opinion and I fully welcome a quiet patch to catch up on rentals, PSN games and the like.
DRCD1
I wish I lived in the UK sometimes… Grey skies, rain, I bet you can play PS3 for longer than five minutes before the ps3 is too hot for touch…
DeathlyCrane
i just got back from our “holiday” in north wales think we had 2 sunny days out of 6 days, and it gets worse … bloody seagull flew into the back of my head and stole my ice cream =[
BryOnRye
Also from the lake district, weather’s sucked pretty much from the first day of july!
DeathByNumbers
You’re just not supposed to spend all day playing games lmao
Schoolkids will play the games for a while most days when they get home for an hour or so. Plus people go on holidays and stuff. Release games when they are ready I say.
djsunna
the games industry targets october upto christmas as the time to release AAA titles last year was a bit different with MW2 and uncharted 2 released in that period and some feared they would be overlooked and the delays to games such as final fantasy 13 and heavy rain. this year GT5, CoD black ops, need for speed hot pursuit, star wars force unleashed 2 all released in time for christmas this year. also i agree with deathbynumbers that people going on holidays in the summer leaves little spare money to spend on new games.
scylax7
I think at the end of the day this now standard Summer break works for everyone.
It gives us all a chance to catch up on games we havn’t completed or played enough aswell as time to enjoy doing the other things in life without missing out on any releases.
Also it allows developers more time to polish games that get released in September as otherwise they would have to be released earlier in the Summer.
teflon
Well it’s simple, isn’t it?
Hot weather means that more people go outside and out of the house. It’s not like the winter where everyone stays inside of an evening and wants something to keep them entertained.
Movies are a different matter, since their initial release is in the Summer, so that’s a day out, which can often be sandwiched with shopping or lounging in a park/pub. Then their home media release is in the winter, during the “stay at home” time of the year.
But that doesn’t stop some developers releasing in the summer, Starcraft 2 this year, inFamous and Batman:AA last year, MGS4 the year before that… There’s a handful of them that come out, and they can often be quite successful when they do so.
Don’t forget that not too long ago it was an oddity to release in the first few months of the year, but now more and more big games are fleeing the Christmas holidays into the start of the next year… Soon we’ll see games slipping from a Jan-Mar slot to the summer (as Batman did) more often…
cc_star
I always wonder why games that want to avoid the CoD factor (& this year its the Halo: Reach and GT5 factor) they don’t schedule their releases for the quieter summer months, rather than the now crowded Feb/Mar/Apr?
It’s like when a record studio releases a single in Jan/Feb where its the easiest time of year to get a Number 1.
The only reason I can think of for gaming is that a Number 20 hit in Oct/Nov sells more than a chart topper in Jul/Aug
bunimomike
For my mind, I find it strange that the publishers don’t release more during the Summer as it’ll help bring in the money during the quieter months. If the industry brings in only 10% of it’s annual trawl during the Summer quarter, that’s a staggering small sum in comparison and tricky for all but the biggest companies to endure.
I wonder if publishers realise that the enthusiastic gamer is more likely to buy during the Summer but maybe they could start their advertising in September so as to appeal to the larger sector that isn’t as interested in the warmer months. It would bring some money in for the studios/publishers/etc, then they could push hard when the time is right.
beeje13
Games i want this year:
F1 2010
PS Move + RUSE
FIFA 11
Black Ops
GT5
Crysis 2
NFS: hot pursuit
I cannot possibly get all of those on release, but i try my best:
Pre ordered Move + RUSE
will have enough cash for FIFA, F1 2010 and Black ops (priority)
GT5 will ask 4 xmas aswell as the move navigation controller + sports champions.
Struggling with Crysis 2 and Hot Pursuit…..