Holiday Rush of Games Is Due to Lack of Coordination, Michael Pachter Says

As the year is drawing to a close, you can clearly see just how many new video games are lining up to be released at the end of it, right before the winter holiday season. We've already seen many titles be pushed back into 2010 and the trend is still keeping up, and, if we're out of luck, we might see very few new properties in the holiday season, only sequels.

This is largely due to the fact that the industry isn't as well-coordinated as the movie one, for example, at least according to Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter, who revealed to Joystiq his thoughts on the rush of titles this winter and how many of them were delayed into 2010.

“I think the game industry isn't particularly well-coordinated,” he said. He exemplified his statement by saying that if two movies appeared on the same day, you'd go to one during the first weekend and see the other the next one. “But the game business is different,” he continued, “because you're not going to go out and buy three games in one month. ... Well, maybe you will, but the average consumer won't.”

The reputed analyst also pointed out the fact that we saw a veritable drought this spring and summer in terms of new games, which didn't happen, for example, last year. Also, video games that require a lot of spending effort from consumers will appear: “This fall you have games like The Beatles: Rock Band, Tony Hawk: Ride and DJ Hero. Those are like buying two or three games, and that sucks a lot of money out of the cycle.”

But even the delay of any game into the beginning of 2010 won't save it from the rush of new titles, as we're seeing a lot of quality releases, from the likes of Singularity and BioShock 2, set for such a release date. “I think the biggest problem you're going to see is that Q1 is now equally crowded, especially considering they're going to be relatively low-dollar months.”

Let's hope that gaming executives will try to set the new release dates in ways that will benefit the game and the gamer in the end, and we won't see a saturation of the market anytime soon.