14 DAY TRIAL // There are certainly a lot of video games arriving almost every week, but there is a specific season where the “flood” of high-quality titles is overwhelming for many average video game fans: the winter holiday season.
As we've seen, there is a huge demand in the months before the end of the year, and this is speculated to the maximum by publishers, which schedule high-quality blockbuster releases in this time frame. As such, we're seeing a lot of sequels already getting ready to be launched this autumn and winter, from Modern Warfare 2 or Halo 3: ODST to Left 4 Dead 2 or NFS Shift.
But one game we won't be seeing this winter is Quantic Dream's Heavy Rain, which emphasizes story and mystery over more classic gameplay mechanics like shooting or building up a character. Set to be a PlayStation 3 exclusive, the game will be published by Sony Computer Entertainment in the early months of 2010.
Now, the co-CEO of the studio, Guillaume de Fondaumiere, highlights how important the release of a new game in another period than the holiday season is. “We've always known that we had a window to release the game, and it's important for us to finish it the right way. We've got some margin either way, to some degree, but again I think there's a responsibility, and we don't want to deceive – so it's important for the game to be polished up until the last minute.“
“Also, purely from my perspective, most publishers today realize that it's not ideal to release a new IP or a new genre just before Christmas. It's a very crowded place to be, and certain games need more space to live their life. Everybody working on the project, both at Quantic and Sony, believe this is the right time.”
This point of view is getting more and more mainstream, as even Activision has delayed its Singularity shooter in order to protect it from Modern Warfare 2, a game that, according to analysts, will break a lot of records when it will be released in November.