Sometimes, it doesn’t matter how good your game is. Sometimes, it matters more the environment that your game is released in. Usually, when we point this out, we’re talking about gaming competition. Surely, Matrix Online and Saga of Ryzom would have fared better if there’d been more seperation between them and the juggernaut that is Worlds of Warcraft. Guild Wars fared better, but undoubtedly part of that is that MMO fans didn’t have to layer another subscription fee onto their existing WoW price tag.
The catch, of course, is that your ability to delay a launch is very limited. You hope and pray that you manuever yourself towards a good release window, but a full-sized MMO team burns through cash faster than Halliburton. You might be able to delay your launch a couple of months, but at some point, you have to bite the bullet before you start laying people off. This is obviously more true for smaller companies, but even inside behemoths like EA, your potential is fuzzy, but your actual burn rate is undeniable, which creates an impetus to ship as soon as possible.
The real tragedy is that it’s pretty hard to know exactly how important timing is. I frequently use Dark Age of Camelot as an example of a game launched in a perfectly timed release window, but comparing DAoC to MxO or SoR is fundamentally comparing apples to kumquats to chainsaws. We’ll never know how much poorly DAoC would have done if it had shipped closer to EQ, or how much better MxO would be doing if it had shipped now as people start to get bored of waiting in battleground queues in WoW.
All this is leading up to the XBox 360, which of course is shipping ANY DAY NOW. Kotaku points out this article by Mike Antonucci, positing the XBox 360 launch is setting up for disappointment due to… gas prices?
It’s certainly possible. A lot of people are spending cash they weren’t expecting to. The economy is in a disappointing quagmire and salaries aren’t keeping pace with inflation. Gas prices are up. A lot of people’s disposable income went to help Katrina victims. It’s not the best environment to ship a game platform that’s only immediately available in a $600 dollar bundle packaged with two games you don’t even want. Even more troubling, there’s no immediately obvious must-have title at launch – no true equivalent to Halo or Mario Kart.
But Microsoft didn’t choose this window on purpose. No one predicted Katrina or $3 dollar gas. In the absence of other hard data, Microsoft chose the best release window they could think of in a vacuum – one that would hopefully set themselves up as spoilers for the Playstation 3 launch. And I actually think they have a good chance of being down at a good price point, with a reasonably decent set of games, when the PS3 wanders onto the national stage. The question that I have is how much momentum the XBox 360 will have when that comes around.
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