| Kantor said: Fair enough for the first two, but the first is stupidity on Polyphony's part, the second really ought to have been discovered earlier, and as for changing date because of revenue... it's a few weeks before Black Friday. It's bang in the middle of the holiday season. Perhaps a delay to avoid releasing next to Kinect? Really, if the third is true, it's probably launching on Black Friday week. |
The first isn't stupidity. It is smart use or resources. GT5 will make any amount of money you throw at it back so long as you have enough potential buyers. So while waiting for that to hit you use parts of the team to get other projects finished which lets you maximize use of developer time while helping minimize potential risk (older games rarely sell as well), polish it easier as you have more experience debugging, and doesn't really harm anything. There would be a benefit of higher initial sales, and stronger legs over the same period of time.
The second could be amazingly obscure. It could occur under extremely rare circumstances that had not been identified, or worse had not been able to be replicated on demand. Unless you can force the bug to happen fixing it would take a miracle to say the least.
Although the above is moot. Evidently it was an "executive decision." I'd bet the farm on marketing having some statistic to prove that it will make more money on date X. Delaying to avoid Kinect seems really likely at this point. Anytime in November will keep the game "new" enough to get the same stupidly huge Black Friday boost I suspect. I don't suppose the general public will ever know for certain though.
