Video Games: Tuesday. Comic Books: Wednesday. Like this: Like Loading Leave a Reply Cancel reply Enter your comment here Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:.
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As a result the publishers release on Tuesdays because that's when the games can be sold with as much inventory as early as possible. Like others have said sales figures and trucker transport makes Tuesday the smartest choice. Why Nintendo release on Sunday however is the real mystery. Nintendo games come out on Sunday because in Japan Sunday is the only day of the week most students and many adults have off from work.
Why they do it here in the states is a mystery to me. Games "seem" to be released on Tuesdays because they are released on Tuesdays. You'll have the occasional odd-ball Friday release and Nintendo continues to release all of their games on Sundays, but those are really the three game release days outside of Wednesdays for XBLM releases.
Because most modern games are sequels, and Tuesday sounds like "2sday". We often refer to them as midnight launches because they tend to involve crowds queuing on Monday to buy the game at a minute past midnight on Tuesday morning. These midweek midnight launches upset the usual way of things, yet they're accepted all the same.
That's because they benefit the machine. Shops like them because they get to make a song and dance out of the whole event and flog a load of copies of - and merchandise for - what is probably a very popular game on a very unpopular day of the week. Publishers like them because they make their games stand out from the crowd.
They also get a full week of sales for the chart. And you lot must like them otherwise why else would you stand for hours outside on the cold November night? But as midweek launches increase in frequency, piled on top of the existing Friday schedule, they can cause problems. Shops lose track of what goes when, particularly outlets like Asda or Argos whose staff typically don't know as much about games, and where catalogues are vast and varied.
When stock for a Tuesday arrives in the regular delivery cycle on Wednesday or Thursday the week beforehand That's when accidents happen. I would be happy to switch to a Tuesday as long as it became common, the norm. Nevertheless, the UK retail machine can clearly handle a Tuesday launch, so why can't we do it more often, or even move entirely to it? I see no reason why anything can't be moved, frankly.
There's no reason why all games shouldn't be sold on the same day, there's no reason it shouldn't happen. But there's always reasons that will get in the way of that happening. Tick HMV off under self-interest. But not everyone releases games on a Tuesday in North America. One of the biggest players of all, Nintendo, opts for Sunday launches and has for some time mm, Sunday launches.
The Wii U was the most recent of these, arriving Sunday, 18th November. Tuesday is usually the day, though, and it simply won't budge. It's much easier to have the teensy UK and most of Europe fall in line with the gigantic US than vice versa. Also, imagine trying to convince a US-based company to favour another market above theirs, because that's effectively how it would be seen.
Not only is there national pride to consider, there's also the size of the market: the US dominates approximately 40 per cent of boxed product video games sales worldwide, Dorian Bloch tells me. Europe accounts for 36 per cent, and the UK 30 per cent of that.
On this table, the US holds most of the chips. Sulyok continues: "Any gamer will tell you, if they're active in a community, that they've got mates who are in Russia, in the US, in Canada, in Australia, because that's just the gaming community and how the gaming community operates.
Community is the key word: the games with the strongest communities are those most likely to launch simultaneously around the world, not least because there would be pandemonium if they didn't. Case in point, Football Manager , which launched globally on Steam at This year we've said from the outset it will be released at Pressing that button, incidentally, was as tricky as having an MSN Messenger conversation with his production team at SI and a couple of people at Steam.
Steam then asks if he's ready to go and he says yes and they press go. There's no actual big red button for Jacobson to press, although there is for patches, apparently.
Football Manager 's launch was both unusual and exciting because it revolved around a Friday and the UK. In other words, don't piss off the shops - it's probably hard enough getting shelf space for boxed PC games as it is. Don't be hoodwinked by the notion that boxed sales of PC games have disappeared, either.
Another contact tells me boxed and download PC sales only reached parity in July this year in the UK, so boxed sales are still significant enough to matter. That digital freedom is caged further by multi-platform marketing campaigns. Watering that message down with different dates for different versions could ruin it all.
If you're going to pay money for a poster or you're going to pay money for a bus stop, you want to make sure that a console gamer and a PC gamer - or whatever platform customers decide to consume that game on - that all of those different stock keeping units are available at the same time.
There are other more boring issues hampering downloadable release date synchronisation. Simple technical issues like dealing with lots of day-one DLC or wanting to staggering load for bandwidth purposes; localisation concerns such as translation or regional age ratings. Germany is particularly tough on blood in games, and publishers might hold up launches in other territories so Germans don't shop elsewhere.
There's also tax and the "outdated" laws that don't transition online where there are no physical borders, Andy Payne adds. Only if we can convince the entire establishment it's worth the upheaval of change. It'll be tough to see the whole industry rallying behind one worldwide release date.
We don't want to go out on the same day as those guys, we'll pick a different day and to be different we're going to say we've got FIFA Thursday or whatever it may be. It's a free market out there and people are going to use every advantage they can to make the best of their game - and more power to that. It should stop now. It certainly shouldn't be around next year. I can't think of any other reason why you would hold it back.
Although don't expect boxed sales to disappear entirely, cautions Struthers - expect them stick around like vinyl has "after its demise has been celebrated so many times". Bear in mind, too, that unified dates might not suit all games, and some companies might not need or want them. The games industry is an industry that evolves and adapts very quickly to changes in consumer requirements.
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