November Schedule Is Quite Crazy, Please Move Something To December
With both the new generation of consoles picking up steam and the previous generation still alive and well, there is no shortage of promising games coming out. Unfortunately though, the releases aren’t exactly spread out evenly over the year. Instead, summer was once again very dry in terms of releases, and now we’re about to be flooded by a downright overwhelming amount of titles, according to the November schedule.
We warned that the same was about to occur on October, but eventually there were many delays and the month looks a lot better now; however, most of the weight has moved onto November, which was already packed before. As a result, this month is going to make the wallets of gamers around the world cry. But not only that, there is a serious concern for many great titles to be overlooked in this avalanche of big releases; money isn’t the biggest issue, time is.
It is common practice in the gaming industry for the heavy hitters to come out around the same time: the holiday period and the few months ahead of it. This is obviously done because it’s the time of the year when people are most willing to buy. But is it really such a good strategy after all?
Let’s take a look at just how busy November will be. Right at the beginning, on the 4th, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare will hit store shelves, and it’s no big secret that this will be one of the biggest selling titles of the month. Just a week later, Halo: The Master Chief Collection will be available for Xbox One. This is on the 11th, the same day when a new installment in the multi-million selling series Assassin’s Creed launches. Actually, scratch that: two new Assassin’s Creed games will be released on that same day: Rogue for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, and Unity for Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PC. But that’s not all: Ubisoft is releasing yet another title on that same day: their new ambitious online racing game, The Crew; there’s also Lego Batman 3: Beyond Gotham on schedule for 11th November, though this game targets a quite different audience.
Just two days after, on November 13th, two more anticipated games will appear. I’m talking about Pro Evolution Soccer 2015 and World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor, which have very different expectations; the first one, although formerly king of football games, has now been dethroned by FIFA and releasing two months later isn’t gonna help it. WoD is the fifth expansion of World of Warcraft, the most popular MMORPG (and arguably videogame) of all time; although subscriber numbers have been waning for some time now, the rise of a new expansion should most certainly bring some old players back, keeping them busy for a while.
As if November wasn’t already filled enough, Rockstar announced just yesterday that Grand Theft Auto V will be released for PS4 and Xbox One on the 18th of that month. The game already sold 33 million copies on last gen consoles, and it’s guaranteed to sell loads of copies on next gen as well. But hold on, because November 18th is just crazy: aside from GTAV, on this day gamers will also be forced to choose between other very promising games like Dragon Age: Inquisition, Far Cry 4, Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor (PS3 & 360 versions) and Project Cars; it may well be the most cramped day of the gaming year, with the addition of Escape Dead Island and the WiiU version of Watch_Dogs.
November concludes with a big release for Nintendo 3DS: Pokemon Omega Ruby and Sapphire. As those who follow the industry will surely know, Pokemon never fails to enter the sales charts when it comes out, which means that Nintendo isn’t really concerned.
A schedule this thick may seem like a dream for gamers at a first glance, but the sad reality is that no one will be able to buy and play all these games at the same time. What will most likely happen is that the smaller titles will be drowned by this inescapable wave, which is a real shame since they need the sales the most. For example, Persona Q will launch just a few days after Pokemon, which probably means many 3DS gamers are already occupied with this game; as for November 18th, the day with some of the biggest releases, LittleBigPlanet 3 may be the victim here. What is especially sad about this is that the previous two LittleBigPlanet games were universally loved by PlayStation owners, so had the game released on another day, it might have stood a much better chance at garnering some good sales. But now, it is all too likely to be overlooked in favor of bigger titles.
We may only hope that this publishers’ strategy of releasing games in a specific week or even day, regardless of what other big games are coming out, won’t hurt the sales of smaller titles too much, but it does seem like this will be the most likely scenario. Many gamers would like to support all those great games, but time and money simply falls short to do this, so it’s up to the publishers to make smart decisions in order for their games to get a fair chance.
Right now, December is basically barren in terms of releases. Our hope is that just like for October, a few companies will announce some short delays from November into December, giving some much needed breathing room to both gamers and their own titles.