User Blog:
Causes of Video Games Delays

What causes a delay? Why is it that your game you had down as a must in your stocking this past Christmas has suddenly been pushed back towards next year’s holiday season? It can always be frustrating when a game that is eagerly anticipated becomes delayed for whatever reason. It is becoming more common these days that titles released for the Nintendo Wii, Sony Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 are missing their intended release dates.

It is easy to blame the difficult economic situation as a reason the recent holiday season has seen many games have their release date shifted to next year, however rocketing game sales doesn’t seem to factor in on why that would cause such a problem. Instead, the increase in the games sale market has seen the large boom in revenue flood towards this degree of media, taking over a larger market share than music and film sales. Publishers are more willing to push more money into developing new games to get a large payback that could create massive game sales. This slump in the economy hasn’t stopped large advertisement campaigns from promoting the latest release in every possible location, from billboards to a personal brand of energy drinks. Publishers would want to push a game out as quickly as possible; their objective to drive a game out of the development studio and on to shop selves gets them the money from the games sales.

There can be many perfect examples of why games these days are delayed; with a massive increase in the technology requirements set out by each new release creates a big benchmark for customers to create a bigger and better game. Looking back years ago you can see the massive scale difference in games, comparing what they were 10 years ago to what they are now. This new brand of generation consoles has allowed new features and abilities into videogames allowing them to create a whole new experience and make videogames better because of it. New additions include multiplayer, high definition graphics and motion control games. These add-ons create larger production times on top of the core features the game already possess. If the game isn’t living up to the standard set by previous iterations then players will be disappointed, they’ll feel they haven’t got their best out of game because there is simply much better content in other games, this can be if the game lacks multiplayer or the graphics are of poor quality.