14 DAY TRIAL // 2008's holiday season was filled with high-end releases, especially in terms of blockbuster sequels, from the range of Gears of War 2, Resistance 2 or Fallout 3. This led a lot of people to spend their small budget on such titles, thus neglecting new properties like Dead Space or Mirror's Edge.
Seeing this mistake, EA revealed that a different release strategy was needed in order to get the most out of the new titles. This problem would have also occurred this holiday season, for large publisher Activision, which was prepared to launch both its hugely anticipated Modern Warfare 2 shooter, but also Raven Software's new sci-fi shooter, Singularity.
Seeing how Modern Warfare 2 might dominate the holiday season, the large company considered it fit to announce yesterday that it had decided to push back Singularity into the first quarter of 2010 in terms of release, so as to not see it get lost in the rush to buy the Infinity Ward-developed first-person shooter.
Here's what an Activision spokesperson had to say about the delay: “The level of excitement for Infinity Ward's Modern Warfare 2 coming out of E3 well exceeded our expectations and therefore we have decided to move Raven's upcoming sci-fi first person action title, Singularity, from 2009 to Q1 2010. We believe that the March quarter will provide a better opportunity to establish the new cutting-edge action IP as a 'must-have' title and clears the way for Modern Warfare 2 to dominate this holiday season.”
We've seen quite a lot of statements from various Activision employees declaring their confidence in Modern Warfare 2 and, given that it will certainly be met with commercial success, this move is definitely a good one and will pay out for both projects. But, until November, when Infinity Ward will launch its game, we still need to wait.