Spoilt For Choice
How crammed release dates are spoiling gaming
by Lyndsay Noir
© 2012 Lyndsay Noir
With the 2012 October to November game and console launch window being one of the most promising and exciting yet, gamers all around are rejoicing at the vast collection of games and consoles that they can purchase during the year’s last months.
I personally have a massive list of must buys that I have only just started to reduce thanks to the recent releases of Dishonored and Fable: The Journey.
However the problem many gamers will now have to address is the issue of expense.
Spoilt or spoiled?
I know many friends who, due to living on a low student income, are having to make the hard decision between games to prioritise when purchasing.
This is tough due to many reasons.
Firstly, it will suck if your friend completes the game you decided could wait for now, and then proceeds to ruin the spoilers for you. Or you could find the same problem by just turning over the wrong page of a magazine weeks after its launch.
Secondly, you pick the wrong game, even after all its hype, it just didn’t live up to the awesome standard you built it up to be in your mind, and damn… You’ve gone and bought it and now have to complete it, wishing you had the other! We all know that feeling right?
Lastly, if you pre-order, you often get pretty neat extras that come with the game. I mean I personally pre ordered Black Ops II, and this was partly due to the fact that I’d get a real life care package!
Too Many Games At Once
So my issue is, that with so many releases all at once, I mean I’m talking Halo 4, Assassins Creed III, Call of Duty: Black Ops II, Hitman Absolution and Little Big Planet Karting, along with plenty others, all before Christmas, how are we average Joes going to afford them all?
Or choose which ones we want to play?
I’m not too sure if many people agree with this problem, and frankly it is quite minor on the worldwide scale of things. I mean perhaps it is about time we showed a little more patience rather than expecting to buy all the games all at once.
But perhaps if release windows were not crammed so close together we’d benefit and developers may even benefit as gamers wouldn’t be choosing between a handful of titles and would instead be able to purchase more new releases as and when they came out.
What do you guys think? Should prices be reduced? Windows be spaced better? Or is it fine as it is?
© 2012 Lyndsay Noir
Filed under: 3DS, Blogbanter, Console gaming, Editorial, Game Impressions, Game Industry News, GameBanter, New PS3 Games, New Xbox 360 Games, Opinion article, Oxcgn Special feature, PC News, PS3 News, Wii News, Wii U, Wii U News, Xbox 360, Xbox 360 News Tagged: | Game distribution, game release dates, release windows, video game releases
By the time you finish one the next one on your list will be discounted. By the time you finish that one, the third one on your list will be cheaper still. Give yourself a pad of a few months by playing a few games from that giant backlog you’ve been meaning to get to one day before even starting the process and you could never pay more than $15 for a game, problem solved.
Generally speaking the “student” demographic is not taken in to account by publishers, nor should it be. When it comes to games around this point in the year, we see it as crowded, but the publisher sees it as a singular purchase, they don’t (nor should they) care about other games coming out.
They just want you to buy the game they put out. Many of the games (Assassin’s Creed VS BLOPS 2 for example) are different genres meaning that a high percentage of gamers are going to go for one or the other, not usually both.
The same can be said for franchises and mechanics, some will go for BLOPS 2 over Halo due to multiplayer.
So yes, I feel that gamers just need to be more patient with purchases, if you have a friend that will ruin the story, put them on ignore, block them out. As with magazines, turn the page, don’t read the article, don’t click that link. It’s fine as is
Al
More often than not, I think our friends would be going through the same decisions on what game they should buy/play.