For the last two months Portland has been caught in the grip of a drought. Not a total drought, although that was the case around a month ago, when my roommate was forced to water the campsite in the little slice of woods he owned so that we could light a bonfire there and avoid torching the entire forest. But Portland, which normally has a weather schedule akin to Boulder, Colorado or any other region located abreast of a mountain range, has been dry of late. The drizzles have been irregular and the heat severe.
It seems like a similar clime has existed regarding new games.
Sure, games have been coming out, but of late they’ve been lackluster. Overlord II was the last title I had even moderate interest in, Hearts of Iron and East India Compqn6 two games which caught my attention just enough to make me sit and read about them, Call of Juarez also warranting a brief look long after the fact, but none of those titles made me give up any of my hard earned money.
Instead I spent it on old discounted games I’d been curious about, on Sins of a Solar Empire and Demigod and the Monkey Island remake. I spent my money on ancient games instead of new releases because for some unthinkable reason people don’t want to release blockbuster games during the summer, even when they’re clearly ready.
It’s hard to say why publishers have this mentality. Maybe it has something to do with the perception of video games as a child’s pursuit which should be given up in the summer for the sake of playing the “foot-ball” or some such. Maybe it’s simply a product of large trade shows falling in the early spring and hyping distant titles, shrinking the market for strong new releases which might take attention away from the brand hype. Who’d want to spend all that money on getting Jack Black to hype Brutal Legend at E3 only to have it be overshadowed by something like Assassin’s Creed 2? Or perhaps the development cycle has simply been established in such a way as to make a summer release an unattractive prospect for game makers.
Whatever the reasoning is, big summer releases are almost always the exception rather than the rule, a wonderful treat in a strange year. They’ll often stand out only for that reason. So much so that a lackluster title might be remembered for breaking this cycle.
I’m not saying that this is a rule. Many games attempt this and fail, but I do think it’s worth trying and that it behooves the game’s industry to release games throughout the year instead of clustering releases around the 60% surrounding Christmas. I’m not the first to say so. Holkins and Krauliak have both voiced frustration at this seemingly backwards tradition of the game’s industry. But I do want to point out some particularly odd members of the “ready to go but still in the gates” community of not-quite-summer releases from this year.
Heroes of Newerth, a shameless DotA clone which copies swaths of the original game play from DotA and removes much of the DIY brilliance it had but manages to, despite losing the indie panache, maintain the flavor and fun of DotA, is a great example. Newerth recently entered beta and anyone could tell you that it’s been ready to go for some time (Likely since DotA entered version 5.84c. Who’s with me, veteran DotA players?!) Newerth is a tiny game, produced from an existing idea without a large amount of input from the original DotA design team, Guinsoo, DotA’s best known developer, having moved to direct competitor League of Legends. It’s made by a group of developers known for making the Savage series, a group of very ambitious games perhaps best known for their total lack of success.
Heroes of Newerth will probably be a big success, although not as big as developr S2 would like, and it appears to largely be in the hands of the developers as far as distribution goes. Their beta is readily downloadable from their website, a tiny file which will run on aging hardware and never need a box release. It is an improvement, in some ways, of the WC3 engine (in other ways, a huge step down; just because you have access to particle effects doesn’t mean you should use them) and shouldn’t stress your processor in the least if you’re using a computer made in the last decade.
Yet despite this simplicity it remains in beta. It’s a port of a game, albeit one changed vastly over time, that came out when I was still in high school. And, having played the beta, it’s clear that it could come out tomorrow to rave reviews and rampant sales. However, it is noteworthy that the cost of entry, $30, seems a bit prohibitive. I’ve consistently found that fewer than 10% of the current player base has preordered the game. It’s a tough sell, after all, when it’s competing with a free-to-play Warcraft mod and when the changes seem largely cosmetic. The most noticeable changes are shifts in how stats and player reputation are tracked, alterations on the player created Banlist system used in DotA. Still, there’s absolutely no reason for this incredibly small game to delay its release, especially considering how empty the market is at present.
On the opposite end of the spectrum is Section 8. I wrote about how Section 8 is going to save the first person shooter genre and, as a game which has been in development for some time from studio Timegate which, despite a difficult relationship with critics, has had no trouble remaining solvent. Tiimegate’s made quite a game in Section 8, a game which is, despite its flaws, as ready as it will ever be for release.
Which is why it is totally inexplicable that they’re sitting on it until the beginning of the holiday rush. Because they’ve taken their time so sweetly I’ve now got both their game and Red Faction: Guerilla to choose between, released within two weeks of one another, and it’s going to be a tough choice. I’d love to say that Section 8 is an unqualified buy for me, but it is so plagued with issues that testing and balancing will never fix that, if I end up leaving lunch at home a few times this week I might just not buy it at all.
And that’s tragic, because if it had come out two weeks ago I’d already have it and love it. It would dominate the long distance multiplayer sessions I find myself drawn into with old friends. But because it’s being released at a time when so many great triple-A titles are due out I’ve got to weigh its purchase against other games emerging in the near future. And Section 8 has a lot of polish. It’s a good game, maybe even a great game. And it came out of nowhere. If Timegate had pushed for a summer release it would be a huge story.
Instead their release is more likely to be a footnote, an attempt at a great game which will be received as good. It’s quite a game, regardless of how it’s received, but because it’s falling into blockbuster season and going up against titles like Arkham Asylum and, more directly, the PC release of Red Faction. I’m no business writer, but common sense dictates that if you want to stand out you might as well do it without commercial competition. Summer would’ve been the perfect time for Timegate to do just that but, through either their own machinations or those of Southpeak, Section 8’s publisher, Section 8 won’t be seeing the light of day until September 1st. To its credit it will be personally heralding the end of the summer game’s drought for me, although Arkham Asylum effective managed that for the rest of the world a week earlier.
My point remains that Section 8 could’ve ended the drought in mid-August, but it didn’t. And it’s tough to say why, since, by the look of the beta, it’s been done for some time. The issue it has, such as the issue of runaway victories through the not-so-selective use of deployables, aren’t going to be corrected overnight, and the selling points it has, such as its Tribes-like gameplay and wonderful pacing, were clearly there months ago.
That is not to say that there haven’t been plenty of important releases in the last few months. Indie darling Trine emerged, doing wonderful new things to the platform genre, and some low budget RTS and TBS titles emerged as well. But as far as big budget games go gamers haven’t had a lot to enjoy, and it’s sad that this has become par for the course.
I wish I understood the business sense of releasing games in this way. I wish I understood the artistic sense so I could contextualize why developers and publisher seem to clutter so many games towards the end of the year. Perhaps they want to vacation with their families around the holidays and would prefer to do so as their games are received? Perhaps they want to cater to all the stay at home moms and dads who now have time freed up by having their children return to school?
It’s an impenetrable choice that these people seem to be making and it’s something we notice as consumers, the same way we notice that Ubisoft releases a game with parkour around the same time every year and that there’s a new Call of Duty game every November. Perhaps the worst offender is Left4Dead 2, a game which will be sold at full price and be bought by staggering numbers of people, likely including myself. It’s a bit pandering, and it would be nice to see the whole system change, even if it’s not particularly realistic. I’d love to be able to sit down and say that I’ve played some new games with my summer vacation, if only so that I can set them apart from all the others I’ve dealt with over the last year.
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