Every holiday season the gaming industry revs into high gear and releases its biggest titles.
This year is no exception.
On the schedule for release: “Arkham City,” “Halo: Anniversary,” “Elder Scrolls 5 Skyrim,” “Battlefield 3,” ”Modern Warfare 3,” “Uncharted 3,” “Saints Row the Third” and “Assassins Creed 3.”
All of these games will be filling store shelves in a cramped three-week window.
Each of these titles could on dominate sales charts and vie for the wallets of many a hard core gamer, but with a mass of huge releases flooding the market in the current economic climate, does too much competition hurt the whole race?
This strange trend happens year in and year out.
Video game companies are carving out a niche of when to release big titles.
The problem is that it seems as if all game publishers have the same idea.
One or two big games are released during the spring, then gamers are left to dry in the what has become a summer game drought.
That’s what video game journalists refer to the period where no games are released as.
It’s also a period where many of us college students have the most free time and are starved for new quality games.
Then in the fall with Christmas around the corner, publishers start unleashing everything.
That’s how we end up with many huge games all coming out at once.
This comes off bad for the consumer, who wants to play most, if not all, of the games everyone is talking about.
At $60 for a new game we’re talking about a ridiculous amount of money.
Many times it also feels as if the games may be shoved out the door without adequate quality assurance in order to make the holiday rush.
That’s why Bioware’s massive, even by massively multiplayer online game standards “Star Wars: The Old Republic” and its rather bizarre Dec. 20 release date has many gamers wondering if the game will be ready at launch or be plagued by server crashes and bugs associated with the genre.
Server crashes on Christmas Day? Not a good way to please the gaming community.
By now, almost all the games in question have been reviewed and all have received near universal critical praise with high marks or perfect scores.
This just furthers the gamers’ plight, leaving them with some very hard decisions to make holiday season.