This week in video games..holy crap.

So I know I have done a few posts about video games, but this week was really something. As an employee of GameStop, I know first hand how much advertising is put into the games that come out at this time of year, and how the developers push them back to maximize sales. This week was a little more crazy than usual.

I worked two midnight releases (an event were we stay open until midnight to release a new game). Usually, we only do them every once and a while, and only for really big games (Call of Duty, for example). But within these past couple of months, we have already done about five, and this week had two in one week!

Now I don't usually mind midnight releases, and I expected the first one for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 to be huge, many people of all ages play Call of Duty. And it was. At midnight, and through about 12:30, we sold over 200 copies of the game to some very eager people. It was a fun night though, we had lots of freebies to give out, and throwing out hats and dogtags to the crowd randomly was like watching seagulls fight over fish. Entertaining stuff.

Later on in the week, we had a second midnight release for the fifth game in The Elder Scrolls series, Skyrim. Now, like I said, I expected Modern Warfare 3 to be huge, but for Skyrim (an Action/RPG/Adventure), I expected maybe 25-30 people. Boy was I wrong. By the time it hit midnight, there were over 100 people at the mall, and the crowd was actually worse than Call of Duty's. Whereas Call of Duty had a ton of people, with ages ranging from 5-60, the Skyrim crowd was a much smaller gap (mostly 20-30 I would say) and I expected them to be pretty behaved, but some of them got a little rowdy, making the night a little annoying.

Overall though, it wasn't so bad. People got their games, I got paid, and I myself enjoyed some Call of Duty. I still can't believe how many games are pushed out for the holidays, but I suppose its the way its going to be when there is money to be made.

Black Friday - The Bane of my Existence.

I am getting somewhat sick of video game companies doing the same thing each year: holding back all of their games until the holiday season.

I understand why they do it, but it sometimes just seems like a wasted effort.

Each year, a ton of new video games are released around the same 3 to 4 week schedule, from late October to mid November, to get in on the holiday rush. Each year, I think "Wow, so many amazing games are coming out, next year will NEVER be able to top this.

Yet sure enough, this year I'm looking at the releases coming up, and I'm like "damn it". Just listing the big titles all coming out off of the top of my head, this is what I got:

Multi-system releases:
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3
Battlefield 3
Dark Souls
Elder Scrolls: Skyrim
Batman: Arkham City
Assassin's Creed: Revelations
Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3

Xbox 360 releases:
Halo Combat Evolved: Anniversary Collection
Forza 4

Playstation 3 releases:
Ratchet and Clank: All 4 One
Uncharted 3 Drakes Deception

Nintendo Wii releases:
Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword
Kirby: Return to Dreamland



All of these are games I am thoroughly interested in (luckily I don't have a PS3, so I can avoid those), and each of these games look to be AAA titles, mega sellers.

Pic above: My wallet after all of these games come out.


What slightly puzzles me but also makes sense: why do all of these games come out at the same time? I know its because people spend more money around that time of year (especially with getting ready for Christmas and all of the Black Friday deals). At the same time though, why do they all want to compete with each other? Especially with Call of Duty, a series that has outsold itself year after year, with millions of copies sold on release day.

Take the recent game Dead Island. That game was not a triple A title by any means, but it came out at the beginning of September, during what I call a "big title drought", where there haven't been any big games that came out in a while. What happened? The game, why not amazing, sold like hotcakes and was hard to keep in stock at the GameStop I work at.

I guess I am just wishing that game developers would try to spread the games out more throughout the year (thank you Microsoft for allowing Gears of War 3 to come out this Tuesday!) but it's really not up to them; it's up to the publishers. And what do they only care about? Money.