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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 "
because people get bored waiting around. When a massive game hits in july it's always bought by many people but now we have a line up of about 10 games I probably would buy if it was over the 12 monthes, but they shove all the "quality" games here. RE4, I'm skipping again, Soul Calibur 3 I might get (now that I read about character creation), Ratchet Deadlocked which is my favorite series I'm only considering, Tony Hawk I'm skipping, Jak X which might have gotten attention in August, is getting overlooked now (and likely should be from what I heard).
Not to meantion the 360, and the 360 games that are getting PC ports will get mostly ignored by me now (though Oblviion will get picked up! YEAAA Elder Scrolls!)
Basically it's not just a shopping time, it's the console release time so everyone's working ultra hard at grabbing money and attention and I have to say it's gonna be a devistating season for some of the losers.
I have to say this year is probably the worst in recent time about pacing, the last couple has been a bit dull, but this year has been semi dull and all of a suddent just ran headfirst into a christmas holiday packed with games, but money will definatly run out before the end of the line for most fans and so many crap games are going to be picked up because of the confusion.
Imagine if they kept Zelda's date for this year at christmas, that game would have gotten overlooked by some people, I'm sorta glad they moved it to April now.