[DoctorEldritch]

Hello Legion Gamers!

On the 22nd of April, Post Trauma got released. @DracoTarot, you may like this one:

But you know what else got released on the 22nd of April? This little game 😅

Which, one may say, somewhat overshadowed Post Trauma release. Must have been traumatic (sorry, could not resist a dad joke with this one). But, to their credit, the developers approached it in a humorous way and announced a planned Re-Release for the 23rd of June:

Hopefully, the second time will be the charm 😉 But it does raise (again) a trend in the current gaming industry: publishers postpone release, as happened with Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown when Hades 2 got to Early access, or just do not announce release dates fearing that they would coincide with some other big release (cough-GTA6-cough). And when it happens, they need to think of ways to reduce the damage, like this one or something else.

So the question is, what's next? This trend only seems to be getting worse. One could say that if you have a good game, you should just release when ready and not think about these things, but smaller indie games can hardly afford to, if even big publishers tremble in fear before the unannounced GTA6 release date. @GoLLuM13, @Telomina, @SKYTRiXSHA and @j7schultz, you're closer to the gaming industry than most, what do you think? Is there a way out of this?

[Telomina]

Yeah i think they're doomed. But really I think it will definitely depend more on their marketing now than it would have done if it was released the same time. I don't think it's the exact same players that are interested in these, but there might still be a pretty big overlap.

[SKYTRiXSHA]

Even bigger companies have trouble not releasing the game in a non-playable state due to time constraints and the requirement that it be out on a certain date.

[DoctorEldritch]

@Telomina marketing-wise, they are trying to boost it with "giveaways, streams and celebrations". We'll see if it helps them escape doom 😅 Though, in seriousness, this will be an interesting case study on the efficiency of countermeasures in a scenario like this.

[DoctorEldritch]

@SKYTRiXSHA I wonder how they decide when the release date is. The project starts, and is given an estimate, but the release date is seldom announced until much later in the production stage. So who has the final say? Dev team, publisher, investors (probably depends on the game/studio). Not to mention, sometimes games get postponed, even several times (Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2), who makes those decisions of whether to release and then patch, or delay the release and polish, I wonder...