Lusipurr.com – Presenting the Sundry Opinions of Lusipurr and Friends

First of all, I want to apologize for the tardiness of this post. I had some big family events take place over the past few months and the tying up of the loose ends happened over the weekend and kind of rolled into and past Tuesday. Forgive me. Please know that if I am late or unable to post, there is probably a very good reason for it.

Speaking of tardiness: Man! How about all those games that got delayed because of Call Of Duty: Modern Warefare 2? A lot of companies expected to avoid this ginormous 800 pound gorilla by pushing back the release dates for their fourth quarter (Q4) “holiday” titles (this period of the year generally seeing the bulk of the “big releases”), and for the most part the did – if they had a game coming out within a week on either side of MW2’s November 10th release date. Sure that title may have stirred up enough sales its first week out to make Activision’s CEO, Bobby Kotick (the opinion of this writer is that “this man has no dick”), smile like a pig in mud (Educated guess: Kotick himself represents at least one of the characters H, N, or 1 as can be proven here), but there has been a sharp decline in sales for the sequel (how could there not be after week-one sales alone saw the public pick up over 5 million copies of the game) making me wonder if the delays were justified.

This is not to suggest that developers could not have benefitted from their delays by giving their titles the level of spit, polish, and shine they may not have received otherwise, but rather that they did not have much to worry about in the first place. Call Of Duty came with a force heretofore unseen across all forms of entertainment mediums (Activision will not let us believe otherwise), but left only a mass of Q1 2010 games to be released in its wake (which, oddly enough, includes Remedy Entertainment’s Alan Wake).

It might sound like I am complaining, but I am not (about this, anyway). It is high time that the industry learns that releasing all their big games at once – putting all their proverbial eggs in this holiday basket (an unseasonable analogy given the time of year) does not make a whole lot of sense. Gamers will buy great titles year round, as Capcom has proven the past three to four years alone with their high profile February/March releases (Lost Planet and Resident Evil comes to mind). What I do have a complaint about is that it took single title to get companies to put games out in Q1 and Q2 of a new year to do this. The game industry does not have an Academy that they have to abide by from which to potentially receive awards, and as much as the videogames industry tries to emulate Hollywood, they don’t need to in every regard, and especially not this one.

I hope that after all this, the industry will learn this lesson, that games can come out year-round without a big hit to their sales because, quite honestly, that crap makes me mad as Hell, and I don’t want to take it anymore if I can help it.