As the fashionable gamer knows all too well, video games might be fickle. You’ll be able to wait for years for a game, just for it to be delayed again—sometimes, the ultimate product is not even price it. Video games can sometimes follow unique marketing and rollout strategies not shared by their film, TV, or literary counterparts: games might be revealed several years before their official launch, sometimes as much as a decade before. The everyday strategy seems a game revealed and released inside a yr, but delays do occur, and a few games have for much longer cycles.
Why do video game firms do that? Why, as an illustration, would Bethesda announce The Elder Scrolls 6 back in 2018, only to say virtually nothing else in regards to the game within the seven years since? The plain answer is hype-building, keeping players on the hook, even when a game is distant from completion. That answer is based on the belief that these announcements are for gamers, but given probably the most vocal voices in gaming are likely to disavow this practice of premature reveals, you could be curious as to why it still happens. The reality is: it happens because these announcements will not be for you.
The Real Reason Games Are Announced So Early
Notable AAA Games That Are Still Unreleased, Despite Being Announced Years Ago
- Grand Theft Auto 6
- The Elder Scrolls 6
- Project Orion (Cyberpunk 2077 sequel)
- Star Wars Eclipse
- Mass Effect 4
Publishers Rely On Investors to Keep the Lights On
Gamers often is the ones forking over their hard-earned money for the newest and best releases, but such releases typically cannot come to fruition if not for shareholders. Video games cannot earn money until they’re released, but they take several years to get from inception to launch, during which period the developer is actually bleeding money. Within the case of larger developers like Rockstar Games and Bethesda Game Studios, game development is funded by their respective parent firms, that are funded by individual investors, hedge funds, and personal equity firms.
Let us take a look at GTA 6 for instance: Rockstar’s publisher, Take-Two Interactive, is a public company whose largest shareholders are The Vanguard Group and Blackrock—two of the most important investment firms on the planet. These firms aren’t investing tens of millions of dollars in Take-Two out of altruism; they’re on the lookout for a return on investment. In a publicly traded company, this return comes from the expansion of the stock, upon which game hype has probably the most material impact. A game like GTA 6 doesn’t need hype for word-of-mouth marketing, it needs hype to draw investors and keep them on the road.
Notably, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick went on record saying that GTA 6 would not be delayed again, just months before its most up-to-date delay, and it’s clear why: Take-Two’s stock price fell dramatically after the delay announcement.
Take-Two’s stock will probably skyrocket once GTA 6 launches, likely even swelling over the yr afterward, translating to massive profits for shareholders like Blackrock. But this same philosophy applies to games from private firms as well. Cyberpunk 2077 is a fantastic example of this: revealed in 2013 and released in late 2020, Cyberpunk is commonly cited as probably the most infamous instances of an organization revealing its game too early. Probably, no less than a part of the motivation for this early reveal was prone to drum up investor interest, gathering funding in order that CDPR’s vision could turn out to be a reality. It could appear backwards, but often, a developer has to make its game seem great before they’ll actually start working on it in earnest.
After all, there are quite a few other aspects that impact the event timeline as well. Management issues, world events, economic downturn, and, in cases like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. developer GSC Game World, real-world warfare, can all end in a game taking longer than expected to achieve the finish line. It is a multifaceted industry, but as is commonly the case, money is the most important motivator. Constructing confidence with shareholders thereby plays a pivotal role in getting a game off the bottom, and because it takes longer than ever to develop a game, it seems likely extremely early reveals could turn out to be much more commonplace.