How can you tell the holiday season is upon us? No damn gaming news. Yeah, we said it... we'll admit it, this is the time to post random articles about random stories hoping to find a good angle to play them on. What's the industry doing?
Many are probably taking time off from long release schedules now that publishers are squirting out titles left and right. Gamers are asking the question "how do I play all these games?" with many asking "how do I afford all these games?"
The fact of the matter is, if you're an older gamer with a few kids and a life you may find yourself sitting at home with a stack of unopened or barely played video games. Guitar Hero 3, Rock Band, Assassins Creed, Mario Galaxy, Orange Box, Unreal Tournament III, Project Gotham Racing 4, Call of Duty 4, Mass Effect and many more yet each game takes a large number of hours to complete, how can we juggle them all?
So many games our minds may simply explode if our wallets don't first. Of course, we resort to saving a few as "holiday gifts" (to ourselves or suggestions to our significant others) and hope we'll have time in the coming weeks to burn through a few.
Where is the sense of accomplishment if we're trying to beat the games quickly so we can move on to the next? How can we play Unreal Tournament III, CoD4 and still continue playing a recently purchased Halo 3? So many questions so much conflict so little time.
Consider the time it takes to develop a game, lets say anywhere between a year and a half to four years for the bigger longer titles. This has been the climax of all that development effort; developers have been driving for September, October, November and early December deadlines in order to realize the effort they put forth.
Amazingly, publishers still see more return on their investment in "units sold" during the holiday season even though gamers just can't collect all the new releases immediately. So, the trend will continue, bursting out huge efforts to target this time of year.
The end result is exhaustion and no news to report about your company because you've burnt all your time, energy, money and man hours hyping and launching your key titles for the season. Now you sit back and relax while you see the fruits of your labor rush off the shelves in a crazy Black Friday like manner.
Unfortunately for us, the news folks, this is a time of sorrow and despair as we clutch at any nugget, rumor or stupid story about video games. People making modifications to their Rock Band equipment, Guitar Hero 3 guitars with LED's, Homophobic Xbox Live Gamers whatever we can find to make a headline. Just watch the news sites light up with weird twists to silly stories with crazy youtube videos or shots of unbelievable hardware modifications.
What else can we do? Play games I guess.
The winner, this season, is you, the gamer. You have to live up this moment as if it was your last because, come early next year, we're going to be sitting in a gameless void of releases. We may see one or two games that slipped their December launch but even those will probably hold out until the end of the first quarter 2008 to see the light of day.
Our tip, harbor your games in a cave of hibernation to only see the light as you find yourself asking the question "what's next?"
