[Editorial] Launching the Release Date
November 17th, 2010 Marc N. KleinhenzWhat’s in a release date?
Apparently, at the beginning of the modern era of gaming, not much. Console manufacturers, not yet lured by the siren that is the fourth quarter of the year or dominated by the rigors and subtleties of “launch windows,” had an extremely flexible and wide-ranging spectrum of dates. Nintendo released its very first system in October (but only in New York; the rest of the country had to wait throughout the entirety of the following year) and chose July to ship the first iteration of the first Game Boy, while Sega used June as the birth month for its Master System. August, interestingly enough, emerged as the first momentous month for the industry, gaming’s original (and short-lived) November: the Genesis, TurboGrafx-16, and Super NES all hit store shelves within its 31 days. And even the first half of the year saw some action, with the Saturn (sort of) debuting in May.
The tradition of reserving Q4 as the exclusive grounds for system launches didn’t nominally start until Sony entered the arena, ten long and dynamic years later. (Technically, 3DO and Atari beat the Japanese electronics giant to the punch, releasing the 3DO in October and the Jaguar in November of 1993, but their consoles are mere footnotes – literally – in the annals of gaming history.) After the PSX, PS2, and PS3 were shipped in September, October, and November, respectively, manufacturers clung to the merry month of November like vultures to a snowbound carcass: the Xbox saw release on the 15th; the PS3, the 17th; the GameCube and the Game Boy Color, the 18th; the Wii, the 19th; the DS, the 21st; and the Xbox 360, the 22nd. Hell, even non-hardware – or, at least, non-system – launches have favored the eleventh month of the year, with Microsoft in particular leading the charge; it started Xbox Live (on the 15th), debuted Xbox Live Arcade (the 3rd), introduced the New Xbox Experience (the 19th), and, most recently, unleashed Kinect (the 19th once more) all in November.
MARCH
PSP – 03.24.05
JUNE
GBA – 06.11.01
JULY
Game Boy – 07.31.89
AUGUST
Genesis – 08.14.89
Super NES – 08.23.91
SEPTEMBER
PlayStation – 09.09.95
Nintendo 64 – 09.29.96
Dreamcast – 09.09.99
OCTOBER
NES – 10.18.85
PlayStation 2 – 10.26.00
NOVEMBER
Xbox – 11.15.01
PlayStation 3 – 11.17.06
GameCube – 11.18.01
Wii – 11.19.06
DS – 11.21.04
Xbox 360 – 11.22.05
The sole exception to this ad hoc tradition, interestingly enough, comes in the form of handheld systems. Although Nintendo shipped the GBC and DS in the fourth quarter, the Game Boy Advance was in June, while the PSP was, bizarrely, in March. And lest a first-quarter release be seen as being too unusual (or, apparently, unique), the big N has already indicated that the 3DS, its fourth portable, will similarly hit shelves in March of next year.
This latter and latest development may have something to do with the still-burgeoning trend of software publishers treating Q1 as the new Q4, or it may simply be a by-product of end-of-fiscal-year book balancing – or, most mundane yet, the manifestation of assembly-line realities – but it nevertheless sends the same signal: as the videogame industry continues to grow and solidify its presence as a major, not to mention permanent, fixture in the entertainment panorama, it needs to rely less and less on the seasonal, toy-purchasing surge of November, generating instead its own momentums at any arbitrary point in the calendar year.
As the market finishes growing up, in other words, it’s heading back to its adolescent stomping grounds.
