Earlier in August, Nexon CEO Owen Mahoney dropped some cold truth during the company’s quarterly investor call, arguing that the “charade of launch timing serves little purpose except this dance with equity analysts.” Essentially, his point was that it doesn’t matter when games come out because they will make money as long as they’re good, but a game that is rushed to make an arbitrary seasonal deadline will suck and destroy the people making it for nothing.
It made me wonder whether our own readers buy games based on seasonal deadlines. Sure, we might roll our eyes and grumble at delays and missed windows, but generally speaking, as long as there’s plenty of communication, people seem pretty ambivalent about delays – look at Guild Wars 2’s and New World’s recent delays, for example. And personally, it doesn’t matter all that much to me whether a game makes the late-fall/early-winter holiday window. Heck, I usually prefer when they launch into dead time period so they can suck up all the air in the room for a month or so. Don’t launch when everything else is launching, and don’t launch the month I’m at my busiest.
Are you partial to specific launch windows for MMOs? Is there a specific time of year when you’d prefer to be buying games? Or do you really just not care when as long as it’s good?
Every morning, the Massively Overpowered writers team up with mascot Mo to ask MMORPG players pointed questions about the massively multiplayer online roleplaying genre. Grab a mug of your preferred beverage and take a stab at answering the question posed in today’s Daily Grind!
