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Opinion: Nightmare dates

The ever-shifting release dates of games reveals the industry's underlying lack of respect for gamers

Opinion: Nightmare dates
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N-Gage + DS + Game Boy ...

It's September 2006. It's the Twenty First Century. We're discovering new Pluto-sized planetary bodies in our solar system. We're watching TV on our mobile phones. Two million people are playing online games across the world on their handheld dual-screened Nintendo DSs. India is growing into a major industrial nation, and China is set to host the Olympic Games.

And yet games publishers still can't put games into boxes and send them to game retailers on time.

Syphon Filter PSP

Syphon Filter: draining our patience

Last week we told you Syphon Filter: Dark Mirror was out today. We made a big deal out of it – after all, this excellent and much-needed PSP title had missed several pencilled-in release dates throughout summer. But even Sony confirmed it to us that it would Definitely Be Here today.

Well, now it has slipped to the 29th September, according to online retailer Play.com.

And quite frankly, it's a joke we've grown tired of.

Can you imagine movie companies being so careless? Can you conceive of a Hollywood studio arranging interviews across all the TV stations, securing dedicated covers on the major film magazines, putting plastic Tom Cruises and Scarlett Johanssons into your cereal boxes – only for you to go to the cinema, walk past the posters of the movie you've come to see, and be told by a bored ticket office attendee: "You're having a laugh, aren't you? We're not showing that – try again next week."

Of course not. Most people wouldn't put up with it – so why do we?

In the old days publishers would blame the late-running development of games, but Syphon Filter has been out for ages elsewhere in the world.

Yes, some language localisation will be required, although surely that could have been sensibly scheduled? It's not as if every game isn't localised these days – and unlike with console games we all have the same PSP screens, so there's no technical conversion required. Development of the actual game was long ago completed: Syphon Filter was released in March in America! US gamers have probably finished it, and forgotten all about it.

So what's to blame? Pirates on the high seas confiscating all shipments bound for Europe? Asian bird flu? Mysterious happenings on the island from Lost involving Hurley and a secret stash of PSPs hidden down the hatch?

Whatever the excuse, it makes magazines and websites as well as games retailers look rubbish when we tell you something one week in good faith, only to have to take it back the next. And it's not as if it's a unique happening – on the contrary, it's more the usual run of things. Just look back through the past few months of our regular Thursday Next Eight Days guides for a sorry catalogue of missed dates and disappointment.

Drill Dozer GBA

The excellent Drill Dozer on GBA has disappeared from Nintendo's schedule

So whose fault is it when we tell you the wrong dates? Is it our fault, for even trying to tell you what you can look forward to? Are we naive?

Should we blame the games publishers, who announce one thing then do another, and who show little remorse at all when games are late out – and in most cases even less inclination to actually tell us when their games slip? They're happy to drip-drip-drip out screenshots throughout a game's development, but once they've got their previews and coverage and the game has started slipping, you often don't hear a peep.

Or is it the fault of over-optimistic games retailers, giving customers the flimsiest of release dates to look forward to, knowing they'll barely notice if they're missed again and again? At least there are trading standards laws governing retail's behaviour, but then again a long period of slippage also nets them lots of pre-orders…

Well, after years of watching this happen, both as a journalist and a gamer, I'm pretty sure I know what's to blame.

Quite simply, the 'games industry' does not respect its audience. It doesn't like gamers. It comforts itself with the pretence that everyone who ever picks up a game controller or buys a PSP is some sort of glamorous model-cum-trainee-lawyer taking time off on the way to the airport.

You see it in the marketing campaigns, in the ceaseless quest to be cool by association with music and film instead of on video gaming's own terms, and in the way that whenever real gamers turn up at trade shows or consumer events, many executives sneer or run a mile.

Now, I don't mean this personally – not in terms of whichever company's game is slipping any particular week, or whoever runs that company. Rather, it's an endemic problem, and I use the term 'games industry' quite deliberately. It's precisely because it's the accepted way of doing things right across the business that games slip.

PlayStation 3

PlayStation 3: Sorry, try again next year

If the games industry's business model and practices were founded on a real respect for gamers, then it wouldn't let gamers down so often – whether it's with games turning up at the shops almost on a whim, or consoles coming out six months after they were supposed to.

Sure there are problems unique to game development. We understand when a game is put off for a year to correct critical flaws that have emerged midway through development – in fact, we applaud it. What is unacceptable is to say a game is out at the end of January, and then the second week of February, then the first week of March, and then, who knows, April Fools Day?

It's very simple: if you can't make the date, don't set the date. Steve Jobs can announce a new Apple product on a Friday and you can buy it across the globe by Monday. Apple's market now expects nothing less. Is it really that much easier to design, manufacture, distribute and launch a brand new iPod?

Games companies simply wouldn't get away with their behaviour elsewhere. For all their pretensions of games being cool and grown up, for all the boasts that games revenues rival movie receipts, game companies basically still think we're kids and they treat us accordingly.

And we accept it. They do it because they can.


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