As the modern gamer knows all too well, video games can be fickle. You can wait years for a game, only to have it delayed again – sometimes the end product isn't even worth it. Video games can sometimes follow unique marketing and release strategies not shared by their film, television or literary counterparts: games can be revealed years before their official release, sometimes as much as a decade earlier. The typical strategy seems to be a game revealed and released within a year, but delays do happen, and some games have much longer cycles.
Why do video game companies do this? For example, why would Bethesda announce The Elder Scrolls 6 back in 2018, only to say virtually nothing else about the game in the seven years since? The obvious answer is to create hype, to keep players on their toes, even if a game is far from finished. That answer is based on the assumption that these announcements are for players, but given that the loudest voices in gaming tend to decry this practice of premature reveals, you may be curious as to why it still happens. The truth is: it happens because these messages are not for you.
Real Reason Games are announced so early
Notable AAA games that are still not released, despite being announced years ago
- Grand Theft Auto 6
- The Elder Scrolls 6
- Project Orion (Cyberpunk 2077 continuation)
- Star Wars Eclipse
- Mass Effect 4
Publishers rely on investors to keep the lights on
Gamers may be the ones blowing their hard-earned cash for the latest and greatest releases, but such releases usually cannot materialize if not for the shareholders. Video games can't make money until they're released, but they take years to get from inception to launch, during which time the developer is essentially bleeding money. In the case of major developers such as Rockstar Games and Bethesda Game Studios, game development is funded by their respective parent companies, which are funded by individual investors, hedge funds, and private equity firms.
Let's have a look GTA 6 as an example: Rockstar's publisher, Take-Two Interactive, is a public company whose largest shareholders are The Vanguard Group and Blackrock – two of the largest investment firms on the planet. These companies are not investing millions of dollars in Take-Two out of altruism; they are looking for a return on investment. In a publicly traded company, this return comes from the stock's growth, on which gaming hype has the greatest impact. A game that GTA 6 doesn't need hype for word of mouth marketing, it needs hype to attract investors and keep them on the line.
Notably, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick went on to say that GTA 6 wouldn't be delayed again, just months before the latest delay, and it's clear why: Take-Two's stock price fell dramatically after the delay announcement.
Take-Two's stock will probably skyrocket sometime GTA 6 launches, likely even swelling in the year after, leading to massive profits for shareholders like Blackrock. But the same philosophy also applies to games from private companies. Cyberpunk 2077 is a good example of this: revealed in 2013 and released in late 2020, Cyberpunk is often cited as one of the most infamous cases of a company revealing its game too early. In all likelihood, at least part of the motivation for this early disclosure was likely to drum up investor interest and raise funding so that CDPR's vision could become a reality. It may seem backwards, but usually a developer needs to get their game working well before they can actually start working on it in earnest.
Of course, there are a number of other factors that also affect the development timeline. Management issues, world events, economic downturn and, in cases like STALKER developer GSC Game World, real warfare, can all result in a game taking longer than expected to reach the finish line. It is a multifaceted industry, but as is often the case, money is the main driving force. Building shareholder confidence thereby plays a critical role in getting a game off the ground, and as it takes longer than ever to develop a game, it seems likely that extremely early disclosures may become even more common.
