Back in 1977, Star Wars made summertime the best time to release an action film, and Memorial Day has become money movie day in the states. If you can, you launch your big budget extravaganza on Memorial Day. That gives your movie the biggest chance to succeed. But that being said, the movie companies aren’t stupid about it. They know that even an avid movie fan rarely spends more than 2 hours in a movie theatre any given week.

In 1999, Star Wars Episode I decided it would release on Memorial Day. Rather than everyone try to dogpile on that day, every other movie decided to cede the coveted Memorial Day release to the big dog. The lone exception was Notting Hill, a chick flick marketed as a movie mom could watch while the kids were geeking out in the next studio over. Can you imagine geek movie history if The Matrix had decided to release the same weekend?

So what does this have to do with us? Well, we, in the games industry, are collectively stupid, that’s what.

In the games industry, it is common and accepted knowledge that Christmas is when you want to release your games. We’re a toy industry. People buy toys at Christmas. You end up with a stack of games. I still have games from last year I haven’t opened. And many have noted that we have an unusually good bounty this year. Here’s a list of some of the games to come out this Christmas season: Halo 2, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Half-life 2. Doom 3 is still warm on the shelves. Metal Gear Solid 3. Metroid 2. KOTOR 2. The Nintendo DS.

Does anyone other than me think that Prince of Persia 2, Vampire: Bloodlines and Pirates are going to SUFFER this holiday? These are three games likely to be excellent, but they just don’t have the buzz that the A-list does. All three are franchises in rebuild mode. Don’t you think these games would have gotten a lot more marketing buzz if they’d shipped in March when NOTHING else is on the shelves at all?

And then you get the MMOs. We don’t play by the normal rules, because we depend on not only getting you to play, but getting you to KEEP playing. If you got five shiny new games for Christmas, aren’t you just a little more likely to quit after the free month? Remember, the box sale is gravy to us – what we crave is that sweet, sweet monthly fee.

But that didn’t stop Worlds of Warcraft and Everquest 2 – but they’re A-list, they’ll do fine. The interesting thing is that there are a whole bunch of add-on packs coming out. All of them are excellent add-ons which adds a lot to their respected games. But all of them are competing for player attention not ONLY with each other, not ONLY with WoW and EQ2, but also with GTA:SA, Halo 2, and Half-Life 2.

The Matrix is shipping in January. Asheron’s Call’s expansion pack is shipping in ‘2005′. Guild Wars is shipping in ‘Spring: 2005′. It’s very possible that all three just blew by their deadlines. It’s also possible that they were scared of WoW and EQ2 duking it out. But maybe, just maybe, the marketing guys at one of these studios gets it – if you can build buzz without competing with a jillion other products, good things can happen.

The original EQ shipped in March. It seemed to do pretty well.