Vi har nu set det mange gange. For noget tid siden udtalte udviklere, store som små, at de ønskede at rokere deres planlagte lancering for at undgå Grand Theft Auto VI, og for nylig har vi set mindre studier gøre det samme med Hollow Knight: Silksong.
Men er der egentlig en fidus i at skubbe en lancering for at undgå direkte konkurrence med et spil der ser ud til at blive meget populært? IGN har snakket med GameSight-marketingsekspert Adam Lieb, der har hjulpet tusindvis af AA- og AAA-titler med marketingskampagner.
I hans optik er der ikke rigtig nogen ide i at forsinke et spil, fordi det det koster simpelthen for meget:
"The most boring business reason is that every day your game is ready to launch, and you don't launch it, it's costing you money. The game is ready. You could be generating revenue on that game... If it's going to be the difference between game success and failure, of course you should always do it, but when that's not the case, you're just talking about wasting a bunch of costs that you shouldn't be spending to push something like three months."
Så hvordan forholder det sig konkret med Silksong? Lieb har følgende at sige:
"If you have an indie platformer, a great time to launch it is probably, I don't know, two to six weeks after Silksong comes out. You've got probably a brand new audience that's playing that style game either for the first time, because it's a huge game, or they haven't played it in a long time, or it's their favorite genre, it doesn't really matter. You've got more people playing indie platformers during that time. [Silksong] probably doesn't have a thousand hours of content. People are going to play it for 20 to 40 hours, or something like that. Then they're going to be looking for the next game to play. So, if you have a game that is in the same space, you actually do kind of want to be around their launch window, maybe even before."