There was a time in the video game industry in which the best games were usually reserved for the holiday season. While that’s still about the same for some publishers, Sony feels that this particular theory has gone out the window.
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Of course, we are talking about a publisher that released Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End last May, and Horizon: Zero Dawn back in February, and both of those games have fared very well. So that’s a pretty good set of examples.
Speaking with Goldem.de, Sony Interactive Entertainment’s Shawn Layden explained that holiday release dates aren’t quite the priority they used to be. “Games are a bit of a business, and timing is very important. By the end of the year, people simply have more money. But it changed a little. Horizon Zero Dawn, for example, was released in February and very successful. Batman Arkham Knight came out a few years ago right after the E3, and the demand for it almost exploded,” he explained.
“We can now publish the really high-quality games almost at any time. It is difficult if almost at the same time a similar top game appears, as was the case in the last year’s business.”
Whether Sony will continue to hold this theory in 2018 has yet to be seen, but it’s got a lot of opportunity to find out. For instance, both God of War and Insomniac Games’ Spider-Man could very well release mid-year, instead of trying to set up something for later in the year. Of course, the company has enough big releases under its belt to stretch them out over the course of the year.
And that’s not including the third parties that have also tinkered with releases over the seasons, with a number of them arriving earlier in the year instead of later. Sony may very well be onto something, even though some big releases still count for something around October, like this year’s Assassin’s Creed: Origins and Super Mario Odyssey, which drop around that time.
We’ll see how releases go over the next few months, but, yeah, we’re totally happy with getting top-notch games earlier…
