Slashdot Mirror
Rock, Paper, Shotgun Call For Worldwide Game Release Dates
deanbmmv quotes a plea from gaming site Rock, Paper, Shotgun for game makers to stop delaying game releases in continents with lower per capita cheeseburger consumption:
"Crysis 2 comes out today! And Lego Star Wars III! Hooray! Except of course, only if you drawl your vowels. These two big games are out in America only today. Crysis 2 reaches Australia on Thursday, and the finally completes its journey to Europe by Friday. Lego Star Wars III: The Clone Wars is taking a three day journey to Europe to reach us by Friday, before then walking to Australia to eventually be released eight days after its US launch. We've had enough. ... There’s an internet now. It’s changed everything. Once we were separate nations kept apart by vast spreads of water. But the internet contains no oceans. The time was a game could come out in North America and we’d not hear about it until the boats arrived carrying news from the new country. But now we can see the Steam page, the giant clocks on the game websites counting down to a day that means nothing, the launch trailers and excitable press releases about something we can’t have yet."
to coordinate a release across multiple cultural, logistical, and legal boundries.
there's a reason why it happens like it does, and it's not because the publishers want it that way.
Now in an ideal world - which is to say a completely implausible world that exists only in my frenzied imagination - copyright protections would not apply to works that were "released" globally but not available in your territory. Which would, in most cases, give the industry a choice between "simultaneous worldwide releases" or "three days of legal, state endorsed piracy-mania in Europe".
Yes, I know there are a billion and one reasons why this would never happen, but I still smile at the thought.
The release date lag is just to remind you constantly that you suck at making video games, you're lucky we aren't charging you more. If there was any competition, make the release date late in the US for a couple hit games, and we'll get the message, until then, keep whining and be glad it's getting released for you at all.
Also, You have to wait *gasp* THREE WHOLE DAYS longer than Johnny over in the USA before you can play your game? Poor kid. Sometimes life just isn't fair.
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
Next up; a demand for products to be released worldwide at the same timezone-corrected GMT-based time.
Yes, it's annoying the marketing idiots seems to ignore the rather significant market of "the rest of the world", but a few days isn't too bad, is it?
I'm much more annoyed by movies (not only because I don't play any games) which sometimes seem to be released over half a year later here in Europe. Most annoyingly, dumbfuck movies like "Big Momma 3" are released on time, whereas good movies can take several months. Then again; a good movie doesn't go bad in half a year.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Let the games be released with no extra regulations to hop through, and they would always be released at the same time. Make companies hop through a million hoops, ban some games entirely from your country/continent, and yes, it might be a day or two delay. I'm surprised there isn't a lot more backlash.
A few days.. really? I remember regularly waiting years for games to make their way from the "Famicon" to my Nintendo. Yes, they're the same platform.
Dragon Age 2 was released in the US a few days before it was release elsewhere in the world. Wondering how good the game was, I hopped on and had a look at the forums, and saw a huge number of people (more than I would have expected) posting about how they were having issues with the game. Decided I didn't want to risk paying for a game that might not work at all reliably for me, so I got a refund for my pre-order off Steam.
Guess that delayed release worked out pretty well for them, huh? Had the game been released on the same day worldwide, I wouldn't have been able to do that, and I would have been stuck with a (potentially) buggy game.
I find it more annoying with TV shows, where I'm unable to legally purchase digital versions... Movies are pretty annoying, as my only choice is iTunes, far as I'm aware (and hey look, serious DRM!).
Why would you do it? Is the American market so lucrative that you can risk both piracy from the impatient and pissing off your customers abroad? What possible reasoning lead a good part of the industry to do something like this?
If you won't sell it to me, and I can acquire it without depriving anyone else of it, no government-endorsed monopoly protections apply.
This would include, for example:
- Movie studios owning the "rights" to a film, while having no intention of actually making that film
- Patent trolls, who do not actually create the product which they own the exclusive right to produce
- Anyone who sells a product which is intentionally broken (DRM, DVD regions, etc)
The idea that it is illegal to "steal" a copy of something which is not actually available for purchase is absurd to me. What are the damages? You don't sell it, so the damages are zero.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
...when you're biggest problem is having to wait three days to play a game.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
I thought this was because of how marketing was done, and that games are usually released mid-week in the US, and friday in Europe.
It's still pretty dumb that they don't release it at the same time. I might pirate a game I plan on buying, and if it's not as good as I thought, then I might end up not buying it after all...
Eat more cheeseburgers.
RETURN without GOSUB in line 1050
Sometimes the delays for games making it to Australia can be a lot longer than 3 days.
Like the recent Ghostbusters FPS. Atari (the publisher of the game after Activision sold the publishing deal to them) pulled some crap and did a deal with Sony where the game was exclusive to the PlayStation console in Australia for a couple of months.
Many fans of this game were pissed off at this (myself included). Once it became known that the US 360 version didnt have region locks and would run on EU/AU 360s, a lot of them just said "Screw you Sony/Atari" and imported the game from the states. I suspect a lot of PC players just pirated it.
All that the limited-time exclusivity did was to result in a lot of lost sales from people who would have quite happily bought the game if they didnt have to wait so long for it.
By delaying a release by 3-4 days etc all the companies do is hurt themselves.
This is what they loose by delaying a release:
1) The guides, walkthroughs and cheats are already available BEFORE people in other countries can even play the game
2) It's available on torrent straight away (So even if you have bought the game, you might still download a pirate copy to play the single player, skewing the figures)
3) If your game is bad, you just lost a load of sales (because people in the UK etc will find out - as these days they stop reviews until release day eg MW2)
4) You upset your customer base
5) People will buy from the states (post/Steam) and so your marketing data is all wrong (2% increase in US sales = 20% decrease in UK sales - ie 20,000 copies say)
The best example so far is Homefront, which THQ did a deal with GAME to stop Steam sales in the UK. When you consider Steam is REQUIRED to play the game, it hurts your reputation (NB you can still play the game using Steam, you just can't but a copy via steam!!)
There are many games released in Japan that will take a long time to reach any western markets, if they do at all. Sure it's because of localization more so than distribution channels but it's still a wait.
"I don't like it."
It is different than previous games and I too am hoping it changes. If you think about the arena level in the Complete Saga (or the first one) and pull the camera way out and add a shitload of enemies and the big monsters, the first two levels are like that. It is less of puzzles and more shooting. Some might like that.
The other I didn't like is way too many cutscenes. There were at least 4 in the first level.
We shall see if it gets any better but I have a feeling I will be playing this one alone which is unfortunate since usually these type of games we play together.
The problem is most big tech/gaming sites are US based. If the US gets release preference , the internet community usually isnt bothered , and anyone complaining is a whiner,baby, impatient etc. If the US doesn't get release preference , its histories greatest tragedy, internet petitions are raised , individuals threatened, people are setting themselves on fire in front of EA's head office , "cats and dogs living together , end of the world people..". Not gaming based but I remember the teeth that were gnashed and the clothes rent in anguish by many scifi forums when the first series of Battlestar Galactica was shown first on Sky in the UK and Ireland(not the miniseries, but the first full series) a few month or so early. To the point where the the creators came out to apologize and beg people not to torrent it. The following seasons all debuted in the states first , any grumblings were met with "whatevs..lol"
Only affects you if you think that you have to have a game on release day.
A lot of people, myself included, won't TOUCH a new game for at least a couple of weeks. Bugs, DRM, overloaded servers, patches, updates, problems. No thanks. I spend enough of my time fixing things like that without having to subject myself to it voluntarily for a piece of entertainment.
(On Steam last Christmas, I bought about 100 games. It cost me about £100. The ones that I checked and reviewed I ended up loving. The cruft that I got for free actually had some worthwhile bits. The stuff that I bought "on a whim" because it looked nice but was "new" and unreviewed I almost universally regretted even if it only cost a few pounds)
And in the end, the only people hurt are the companies that do that. If a game is crap and you stagger release, the last people to get it will already know it's crap and not bother. But if you'd had a simultaneous release, you could have got a LOT more sales before people found out. Unscrupulous, yes, but good business sense. If the game was good, it'll get pirated before people have the opportunity to buy and they might well complete the game before it's available for sale and hence never end up buying it.
I can slightly understand staggering if the game is going to put a huge burden on your servers but if you're releasing such a game without using continent-specific servers anyway, then you're wasting your time.
The only people it really hurts are idiots that buy things they have no idea about on day one in order to stay "fashionable" in their gaming tastes, and the companies that stagger releases deliberately. No loss to myself on either count, there, really.
Rule #1: Don't pay for anything you can't try, play a demo of, get a full refund for, or test for a long time before you deploy.
1/2 of my forefathers were brought to this country as slaves, where they earned a faught for thier freedom. The other 1/2 of my forefathers left your God foresaken country for a reason... That reason was better video gaming.
These delayed releases for anything, be it games, movies or music, promote piracy. Why wait 3 days (or months in some cases) for something to appear in the store if you can just download it now? The whole control of distribution is no longer there, so any company that wants to make money, should not try and use controlled distribution as a money vehicle. Focus on membership fees for online gameplay, added features, bonus things only available to people with a genuine product key and all that.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
how much were you paid to do some name-dropping for this gayass RPS "game site"?
Wouldn't people just offer everything for "sale" at say $1 million? Then you would be "stealing" because you are depriving them of the million dollars you could have paid. Feel free to replace 1 million with "a number sufficiently large as to discourage sale, but low enough to evade any arbitrary cap or 'sanity test' that may be introduced in a misguided attempt to thwart this approach".
I'll take a few days wait. 5-10 years ago we were usually waiting over 3 months to get European releases, at least from Japanese developers. A lot of the time it could be down to translation, with all of europe (and by extension, due to using PAL TVs, Australia), having to wait for 3-5 European languages to be translated. So, I don't really mind, or even notice, waiting a few days.
That said, it is hard to understand why there are different release dates on platforms like Stream. Portal 2 is 3 days later in Europe, and 2 days later in Australia, on a platform that is identical in every region.
Last week my friend bought Dragon Age 2 on Steam, and was eagerly awaiting it's release - it allowed him to download it from Steam a while before the release, and said it would be accessible to play at midnight on the release day. But then, as he was waiting for midnight, he realised the date he'd been waiting for was the US release. He had to wait until midnight a few days later before it let him play. This is a game that's already downloaded and installed on his computer, and is the same code people have been playing for a few days, but because of his location he had to wait for it to be activated?
Clearly it's nothing to do with technlogy, languages, or regional differences, but some sort of business/political reason. I'd be interested to know why.
The idea that it is illegal to "steal" a copy of something which is not actually available for purchase is absurd to me. What are the damages?
Unfair competition with the author's other works.
What an ass. That's like saying "Black and White 3 will be available only if you sip tea while slapping the queen mothers bum". If its made here it only makes sense that it takes them less time to release locally then to distribute world wide. Calm down and wait 3 days. Same way everyone else does when a product comes from your country.
But then the USA got Doki Doki Panic Mario Edition long before Japan did.
And I don't drawl my vowels, you cunts!
A simple "To whom it may concern, due to your illogical release strategies of XXX I have decided that I am not going to buy said product when it is finally released. This is due to the fact that I can not play with my overseas friends on release date, which we had looked forward to. My friends, and anyone else who will likely hear me, are also going to stop buying your products until this strange behavior is rectified. yours sincerely YYY"
They may laugh at it and ignore it... If they get 100.000 such letters however, they may decide that these 100.000 persons and their friends are a large enough group of customers to try not and piss them off.
So far I guess my handful of these letters and my friends ditto have not made a great impact though, but perhaps én masse, it will have an effect.
Now, you can deliver a non physical product. No shipping. Advertising everyone can see, in a place where everyone looks. Sales are handled by an online store that creates secure copies.
Such store in effect is a publisher.
Why do you need the publisher anymore?
To act as a liaison to the only company capable of digitally signing your product for use on retail video game playing devices. Not all genres allow for ignoring the consoles and releasing exclusively on PC, and I can explain why if you want.
Where do I sign?
Let's be honest here: Having all the Internet hype about something, no matter if it's a game, movie or something else, and not being able to get it is one of the major contributors to piracy. If you don't realize that, you're an idiot. There is this multi-million dollar marketing campaign that has one and only one goal: To make you want this, right now. And then you can't. But The Pirate Bay has a copy...
I've said this before: There are roughly three groups of people with respect to piracy vs. sales.
One is the group that'll buy your stuff and wouldn't copy it unless you push them really hard. You can forget thinking about those, they're not a problem.
Two is the group that'll download a torrent no matter what. They may be too poor, or do it out of principle, or whatever their reason. You can forget thinking about those, because no matter what you're not turning them into sales, even if you make getting a pirate copy impossible, they won't buy your game, they'll go download something else.
Three is the only group you should worry about, that's the people who may pirate it, given the opportunity. But they might also buy it. If it isn't too expensive and if it is available. These are the people you can turn into sales by making a pirate copy unavailable through better copy protection, or through a good price, or by simple availability. And these are the people who'll download instead if you're too expensive, or do the staggered release bullshit.
And, btw., I'm not making this up. There are a couple studies on this in a more general approach showing that you can group people in general into "honest", "dishonest" and "opportunistic". And that in crime prevention, the third group is what you need to focus on.
Really, do these highly paid management guys know anything about how the world works? I mean, we have people out there doing studies, research and experiments for a living. We put a good portion of our economy into finding out how life, the universe and everything actually works, from physics to chemistry and yes, social sciences, and the guys running major companies rely on their gut feelings instead?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Make your own video games then
Make games for consoles? Sony and Nintendo are unfriendly to indies. Make games for PC? Statistically no one has a home theater PC, and games in some genres are uncomfortable to play with mouse and keyboard or with the small monitor of a typical desktop or especially laptop PC.
This might come as a huge shock to these fellas, but there's usually reasons behind delays.
For example, translating Japanese to English can't be done in a snap of your fingers, why force the Japanese audience to wait for an English translation they don't need?
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
All I see here is "Baaawwww I'm European." If your life is so terrible because you have to wait an extra week to play a video game, I suggest you seek help. Honestly, no one is forcing you to stare at Steam and drool over the game like a poor child at a candy store. Go do something else. Read a book, pet a puppy, promote world peace, make a video game and make Americans wait a week longer than your neighbors. Find something productive to do because we all know what's going to happen to your productivity when you finally get a copy of the game.
If either Crysis 2
Published by Electronic Arts, based in Redwood City, California, USA.
or LEGO Star Wars III
Published by LucasArts, based in San Francisco, California, USA.
I'm looking forward to the first installment of the new IL-2 series of flight simulator games, IL-2: Cliffs of Dover here in the U.S. but while gamers in the UK and Australia will be enjoying the game in 1 week (March 31st) we Americans have to wait until April 19th. Given the fact that it may be a digital-only game and there is no real language difference here, what is the point of this?
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
IL2 Cliffs of Dover release 3/25 in Russia, but not until 3/31 inn the rest of Europe. But not until 4/19 in the Rest of the world.
Odd as the distrobution is mostly download only (steam, D2D).
Wow, really, acting like only America gets releases first? How about the fact that we still DON'T EVEN KNOW IF XENOBLADE OR THE LAST STORY ARE GETTING RELEASED OUTSIDE OF JAPAN?
*sigh* from all the comments I've read, it really seems like everyone is missing the point. New Lego Star Wars!!! And it's out today!!!!
To Alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems.
I think it's rather interesting that the OP is outraged that the game is taking so long to reach Europe and Australia, all righteous mentioning worldwide distribution, but he completely failed to mention Latin America, which is known to have (both in and out of Slashdot) gamers just as keen to obtain these new releases, and for which the piracy argument is hammered with a lot more gusto. On that same vein, shall I mention Africa as well? Last time I checked South Africa, for one, has a rather decent market size, and I'm not even mentioning other Commonwealth nations.
www.meneguzzi.eu/felipe
PAL versions, Different language manuals clearly take time to make. And QC. Also, it doesn't really make sense to have those teams and the factories doubled to make production faster, more sense to produce one, then switch to the other. A week isn't bad, a lot of games get delayed by 6 months, which is silly. I'm looking at you Nintendo.
I also heard a rumour that there were a few gamers in Asia as well.
But in all seriousness, I think the article was focusing on english speaking gamers. People in Latin America probably want the game in either spanish or portuguese and its understandable that it would take some extra time to get everything translated and dubbed.
Yeah people in South Africa speak english, also India too, but I don't think the article needs to be that exhaustive to make its point.
different countries have different censorship laws, different boards that have to give approval, etc. I'm sure if these things didn't exist then these games would be released at the same time everywhere.
Instead they focus on getting their rating from the ESRB first so they can get it out to the biggest market first. The Australian ratings board is more picky, it takes more time, and they may have to make some changed to the game before it can be approved. The UK has some very strange rules on what is unacceptable language for children (apparently the word "ninja" would make UK children too violent so they can't be call Teenage Mutant *Ninja* Turtles there). I know if its a WWII game they have to remove any swastikas from the artwork so that it can be released in Germany and maybe a few other countries in Europe.
So yeah its stupid it can't be released everywhere at the same time, but I don't think the blame should go on the publishers.
My bad about Asia, but in my defence at least in Japan and to some extent even China they are the gaming Mecca, they have games that will never see the light of day in the west. Many of my friends that are even more into gaming than I am have learned Japanese partly to be able to play some of those imports. And about English skill, most people who game have at least a cursory grasp of English, and in fact use games as an important tool to learn the language. I am myself a native speaker of Portuguese, and aside from very specific games where the localization was interesting (and I can only think of the Tropico games here), I would never buy a game localised to Portuguese. To me, it just feels weird. On a side note, thanks to Lucasarts for making the games that taught me a significant portion of my English vocabulary, and Amazon for shipping games to Brazil when I was growing up.
www.meneguzzi.eu/felipe
Okay. Just tell Nintendo and etc. to stop releasing games in Japan before they get released in the US, and then maybe we can talk.
Really, do these highly paid management guys know anything about how the world works?
Not from what I've seen...
The primary qualification for high management isn't a deep understanding of human nature, after all: it's being buddies with the right rich people, or just being rich enough yourself. Just because someone is a good schmoozer or was able to make a bundle off something doesn't mean they understand how people's minds work. (And that's ignoring the ones who were just born to wealth...).
Between my wife's job and mine (or rather, my former one; my new one is much more pleasant), I've seen far, far too many examples of people in positions of power in companies whose primary skills are nothing more than (to give it a polite name) networking. They know how to make friends and have a good time with other rich people, but their actual business sense, understanding of the people they have charge over, and even understanding of the kind of work those people have to do, is practically nonexistent.
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.