The Christmas Rush In The Games Industry

Gamasutra has a piece offering up responses to their query regarding whether the Christmas rush helps or hurts the industry. From the article: " I think it benefits no one. Developers lose out because their hard work is fighting for a slice of the publishers' limited market resource. Publishers lose out because marketing will cost more in order to make an impact, and consumers lose because they'll miss out on some truly good games just because they either can't afford to buy them all at release, so they don't get bought at all, or they just won't have time to play all the games they do buy properly. -Sean Scaplehorn, IdeaWorks 3D Ltd "

Comments

Easy answer

[kniLnamiJ-neB]

There's *always* going to be a Christmas rush because retailers *create* a Christmas rush. They do their best to make you part with every penny you can possibly squeeze out of a person. They don't realize that this is bad for the business as a whole, they just see their bottom line boosted by holiday sales and that's all that matters.

I'd say the rush hurts the business not only for the reasons listed, but also the games that get shoved out the door too soon because the publisher wants the title on the shelves for Christmas, whether it was finished properly or not. Games should be released when they're good and ready, not when some suit in Marketing says he wants to release it. If the jackass was that good at his job, he could sell the product no matter what time of the year it was, and he would prefer to have a quality product to sell. Just my $.02US....

Take, for example, Beyond Good & Evil...

[scolby]

...which is arguably better than Ubisoft's other holiday offerings at the time, Prince of Persia and the Tom Clancy Game of the Week. Ubi saturated the media with so many ads for PoP and the Clancy game, they apparently had no money left for BG&E. While the other two sold well, BG&E wound up in the bargain bin a few weeks after its release. I'm willing to bet this excellent game would've sold a lot more copies had it been released during a slower time of the year. And if you can find it in the bargain bin, take advantage of the price.

Too much science in marketing

[Jtheletter]

Agreed, in general it seems most every industry is so locked into "tried-and-true" solutions to marketing and product releases that they've almost over-engineered such events. It's gone from "releasing your product in this timeframe/style/venue will likely increase sales" to "OMFGBBQ! If you don't follow this recipe your company will fail utterly!"

The whole science of marketing has become sinister in its fine tuning and I think it's starting to be self-defeating. Take for instance the huge mark-downs on items after the holiday shopping rush. More and more people are realizing that if they can wait a bit longer for must-have item X then it will come down in price, causing retailers to miss sales goals, and have to mark down more mechandise to get it out of the store, etc etc. Same thing with car sales, people are becoming more sensitive when year end model-closeout sales happen and wait until then to make purchases, causing automakers to go through boom/bust sales cycles.

I didn't explain these examples terribly well but you get the gist. I think if markets would relax a bit and take seasonal releases more as suggestions than do-or-die schedules we'd see more year-round product releases and sales would likely improve since every product wouldn't be fighting for market share at the same time. It would probably help the movie industry too for similar reasons. When these marketing studies first started and pinpointed seasonal trends there were large sales improvements because not everyone was following such guidelines, however now that every industry is locked into these release schedules they're seeing diminishing returns from the strategy, and perhaps a new strategy will fare better.

Another Problem

[djSpinMonkey]

In addition to everything pointed out, it also hurts the general quality of games, because in the rush to push things out by Christmas, features will be dropped and corners cut. There's always a balancing act between "soon" and "good," and the holiday season can throw that completely out of whack.

Re:It works for movies

[RoadDoggFL]

But movies only take two hours of your time on a boring Saturday afternoon. Games require a relatively significant investment of your time, and thus are not suitable products to be used as part of a Christmas rush.