Opinion: Using Release Dates for Marketing is Terrible

There are a million reasons release dates can’t be announced months and months in advance. Marketing should never be one of them.

This week I sat down to decide which games my wife and I will be buying day one in 2015. These titles are few and far between. We don’t pre-order, but we make sure we can keep track of what’s coming up when, and how much we’ll be spending in a given period.

It’s not so much about the money, but more the time. Like any working couple, we struggle to play the games that we buy, and good planning means we get to save pennies by not buying things that will quickly drop in price before we get chance to boot it up, and it means we get to experience the things we really love.

This year boasts a number of huge titles that we absolutely can’t wait to get a hold of. Most obvious is Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. It has been over two years since the trailer for the full portion of Big Boss’s latest adventure was unveiled, and nearly three since Ground Zeroes was revealed.

We know that it’ll be available to buy in the next few months, perhaps even as soon as the Spring. So why haven’t we heard something? Why haven’t Konami unveiled a month?

It’s possible that they’re having trouble tracking down a global release date. Europe is particularly hard to work in, and this is a big release. A single release date would be huge.

So perhaps our being kept in the dark is as simple as a major company not wanting to bank on something they haven’t got completely under control. Maybe they don’t want to say it’ll be out on June 30 if it’ll actually be out on July 1. Nobody would cancel their pre-order, but it’d probably cause some minor upset amongst slightly unbalanced people.

But at this point it seems just as likely that Kojima and Pals know they have X amount of content still to share, and that thousands of people are watching each new minor detail with the hope of there being a release date.

There is so much that fans still want to know. It’s been almost two years since we last had a proper cinematic trailer. I’ve played Ground Zeroes through multiple times and watched every piece of content unleashed to fans, and I still don’t think I’ve heard Kiefer Sutherland say more than 20 lines. We probably don’t need a 30 minute reveal for the cardboard box.

And yet here we are, still tuning in for the possibility of perhaps the most important detail at this point: a release date, even a vague one. Confirm we’ll be playing it before Christmas and I’ll be happy.

Because not everybody loves Metal Gear as much as I do, and they’re making their yearly plans of Day One titles as well. And the longer you hold out on those release dates, the more you try to titillate with what should be basic knowledge for consumers, those months are slowly filling up.