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The Fourth Quarter is Almost Here…Again

Here we are in the last week of August, with the fall right around the corner. Kids are heading back to school, the leaves will soon be changing color, and professional sports galore will be starting up again soon. Of course one other thing that anyone who writes about games will greet with equal portions of joy and despair is the Fourth Quarter (cue “Dun Dun Dun!” sound effect).

Before long gamers will once again be greeted with a deluge of new games, and of course most will only have a limited number of dollars to put toward a seemingly limitless onslaught of titles. We’ll have some winners, but more than likely there will be plenty more losers when the dust settles. The fun part will be hearing the excuses game publishing big wigs give for why their titles failed to do well. Of course, the whole thing will be “unexpected”, something that “could never have been predicted”, and so forth.

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This year, it is refreshing to see that most publishers have the good sense to give a game like Halo 3 a very wide berth on the release calendar. However, this can only last so long. Eventually more and more games will start populating the store shelves, as publishers desperately compete for Christmas sales. Some will do well, but a lot more will be pathetic failures.

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While it may seem logical to try and tap into the Christmas sales, it feels like publishers are making unrealistic gambles that their game will sell well while competing against a number of AAA game releases, not to mention all of the other non-gaming gifts (music, movies, gadgets, and the perennial favorite for the ages: socks). I have to wonder if some of these publishers would stand a better chance of getting a decent return on their investment by foregoing developing a new game, and using the money to buy a plane ticket to Vegas, and put the entire development budget for said game on black at the roulette wheel.

But develop these games, publishers will, be it a half-assed licensed game, mediocre action game that will apparently be unlike anything we’ve seen before only to be exactly like God of War, or some other utter waste of time that should never have gotten past the cocktail napkin stage of development. It will just be another blood bath of blah-zeh games that need not exist.

The worst part is that some good games will also slip between the cracks. It’s nearly impossible to predict which games these will be, but it will happen. Japan releases games on a far steadier basis, and these titles do just fine. Granted there isn’t quite the same seasonal shopping frenzy there as in the West, but it does show that such a system can work.

Will it work here? That’s hard to say. Are consumer-spending habits so different in the West (ie. Put everything on a credit card at Christmas, and spend the rest of the year paying it off) that a more consistent release schedule could never work here? Maybe, but people have no problem buy CDs, DVDs, and so forth any time of the year, but why not games?

The more I dig into the issue of the fourth quarter, the more questions that come up. Nonetheless, I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever that this year will be like every year prior where a few games will sell well, and everything else will probably tank. So, fix yourself some popcorn, plunk yourself down on a comfy chair, and enjoy this year’s bloodbath.

What are your picks for the winners and losers of Q4 2007?

Jeff Nash

August 28, 2007


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