A resource for all news, strategies, media, and events pertaining to Team Fortress 2, for PC, coming this fall from Valve - bundled with Half-Life Episode 2 and Portal


Optimized for Mozilla Firefox

Your support of this blog is desperately appreciated. :)


8.11.2006

So when is this thing going to be out already?

If you have found this blog, you probably are web-saavy enough to know how game release dates work. In case you don't, here's the rundown.

Game Companies want the game to come out by a certain date. The more concrete that date is, the better off they end up looking. However, the Game Marketing and Finance departments are constantly telling them to release the games as soon as they can, because they have paid the developers and testers for months and months, and have seen no return of invenstment.

And the Developers are at ends with Finance, because they know that the more time they spend adding new content, and removing bugs, the better the product will be. So they want basically want more time, and marketing wants less time.

So in this power struggle, every project can have wildly different release dates, and depending on who is winning the struggle determines how bankable the announced release date is, or how likely it is to get pushed back. All the while, places like Gamespot and Amazon blatently lie about it, to get pre-orders.

So when is this thing going to be out already?

Right now, no one knows. It is a total crapshoot. Gamespy has said "Late 2006" That could mean between Mid-October to December. uGo.com has said Fall 2006. They are usually not in the loop, so they are probably just trying to drum up hype, or really don't care about the details, since they cover so many things, on such a superficial level anyway.

My bet is January, and I wouldn't even rule out February. Always assume that the release will be towards the latest, farthest away edge of the announce range, and with companies renown for missing deadlines... add a few more months. I can't tell you how painful the anticipation was for The Matrix Online (another class based game that almost tempts me into writing a comparison piece for this blog... but not quite).

Anyway, keep checking back, and I swear, the very day one of the big sites knows, I will have it here also.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home



Google