As nerds our people are wont do this time of year, daily games sites, magazines, and even some members of the mainstream press have spent the last few weeks 
compiling their “Best Of” lists and presenting their choices for game of the year.
Overall, the industry’s at a very weird place for awards season. We don’t have one be-all end-all award like the Oscars or Grammys. Some sites and magazines poll their entire editorial staff, but you still have the occasional lone wolf mainstream reporter that publishes his personal top ten. And there’s really no way to weigh any of these objectively.
Most sites’ awards lists read like a console specific “must buy” list specific to each console. That’s certainly useful for consumers, and even some marketers. But I don’t think it recognizes the people behind the games as well as the Oscars or Grammys. Of course, Spike TV’s VGA’s have been tinkering with that concept for the last few years, with pretty awful results.
The incomparable EDGE Magazine’s quirky, developer-focused awards hit the right spot, but I really thought the most useful wrap-up for industry types was Leigh Alexander’s Gamasutra piece on the year’s top dissapointments. Every point really hits home, especially the part about the holiday glut.
Perhaps it’s just the competitive nature of gamers (and by extension, game developers), but I can’t understand why hardly anyone in this industry has the fortitude to release a big game in any part of the year other than the fourth quarter. I understand a ton of games are bought around the holidays, but isn’t the industry mature enough by now to support at least one other hot season?
I don’t know any hardcore gamer that isn’t sitting on a huge backlog of games from the last 3 months. I know I’ve still got a few retail discs in the shrink wrap, and a ton of games on WiiWare, LIVE and PSN that I meant to download but never had a chance. The fact is, these games get short shrift for the simple fact that their publishers saw fit to drop them within a week of Gears 2 or Little Big Planet, simply because that’s the way it’s always been done.
Madden always has the shelves to itself in August, and there are plenty of gamers that don’t pick it up. Why not give them a reason to go into the store in the summer as well? Wii Fit launched in May and still managed to do killer numbers for Christmas. Granted, Hollywood releases its strongest Oscar contenders in one big bunch at the end of the year, but what would July 4 weekend be like without popcorn bockbusters? The industry is changing. The audience is changing. Isn’t it time to change the release schedules as well?
[...] if the industry keeps up this pace, I may have to issue a teary, self-depricating apology for my New Year’s rant about release scheduling. The first quarter of the year has always been pin-drop quiet, even [...]