A reader is worried that 2020 is off to a bad start in terms of news and new releases and that even worse could be to come.
You’ve probably already noticed, but 2020 has been incredibly boring so far in terms of video games. There hasn’t been a single major release yet and there isn’t really one scheduled until March, with Doom Eternal. There’s been no major announcements from any company (Nintendo’s had two Directs but neither of them were for new games and Sony and Microsoft haven’t said anything).
Instead, the biggest bit of confirmed news, rather than just rumours, has been that a whole bunch of games have been delayed till the autumn, turning the first half of the year from one of the most packed in recent memory to a virtual wasteland.
You’ve got Doom and Animal Crossing in March, Resident Evil 3 and Final Fantasy 7 Remake in April, and The Last Of Us Part 2 in May and that is it for the whole first half of the year. Now some of those games are a big deal, obviously, but that’s five games in six months, with none of them released until the middle of March. It’s even worse when you consider there was nothing new out in December either. So by the time we hit March we will have gone over three months without a single major release.
Some people will no doubt start saying, ‘I don’t care, I’ll just play my backlog’. Okay, fine. Good for you. Well, I don’t really have a backlog, I want to play new games. But there aren’t any. Companies are getting worse at organising their schedules year by year and with publishers concentrating on fewer but bigger games it’s making gaming a fundamentally less interesting hobby for me.
In the second half of the year we’ve got Marvel’s Avengers and Cyberpunk 2077, which are also big games but that is such a long wait and I’m not convinced they won’t be delayed again anyway.
And now we have the prospect that the coronavirus could delay the launch of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. I don’t like to whine about video games when people are suffering but suffice to say that this would ruin the plans for everyone, from publishers to developers to people just saving up to buy a new console.
If any of those big-name games like The Last Of Us or Cyberpunk disappoint, or are delayed into next year, then we really could be looking at he worst year on record for games. And with so few games coming out it really does only take one or two flops, or delays, to bring everything down.
Video games companies desperately need to sort themselves out when it comes to release schedules and the flow of information. Dumping all the new games, and announcements, all at the same time, at just two or three points during the year, is just stupid. It hurts everyone involved and makes the games industry look amateurish and unprofessional. Which, let’s face it, most of the time it is.
Even in the best-case scenario where Microsoft and Sony open the floodgates of information in a few months’ time, and the coronavirus is cured in short order, we still would’ve gone those three months without any new games. Imagine if no new movies were released in the cinema during that time, or no new shows on Netflix. It would never happen. But with video games it’s sadly normal.
By reader Grassple
The reader’s feature does not necessary represent the views of GameCentral or Metro.
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