Recently it seems that the gaming industry has finally realized that releasing all of its vidoegames during the fourth quarter holiday season isn’t the best plan of attack. Too many games get lost in the shuffle. This knowledge has brought about the idea that maybe one shouldn’t release all of one’s big releases against every other company’s big releases. Because of Captain Obvious finally getting through to the game industry a plethora of holiday games have been delayed. But why the spate of delays? Why wasn’t this all planned out?
Analyst Michael Pachter has the answers. “I think the game industry isn’t particularly well-coordinated,” he told Joystiq, noting that movies are able to get out of one another’s way more easily, because if two movies come out at the same time then you can just check out one one week and the other the next. “But the game business is different,” he said, “because you’re not going to go out and buy three games in one month. … Well, maybe you will, but the average consumer won’t.”
So it’s tougher for the gaming industry to get it together and thus we get all these delays. What does that mean for the upcoming first quarter of 2010? Pachter thinks that the quarter will start having the same issues the holiday season does. “I think the biggest problem you’re going to see is that Q1 is now equally crowded, especially considering they’re going to be relatively low-dollar months,” Pachter said. “Think of something like Darksiders coming then, I think it’s going to be hard for a Darksiders to stand out.”
