Is it Ok to announce a game that is still many years away from release?

[Jumpin]

When I hear about a game or product, my preference is that it’s either soon to be or currently available. Nintendo has been very good with this during this generation (and to a lesser extent in the Wii/DS generation) where they constantly promote new releases and games coming up in the next 1-2 weeks.  On Switch, it’s with the news channel and the EShop—IMO, use the browser version of the EShop, as it’s not clunky/buggy like the Switch OS version… one thing I hope they fix on Switch 2.

The main thing I don’t like about excessively early announcements is that it takes attention away from interesting current games and/or interesting new releases. I understand why a new console might want to pad their early catalogue for advertisement purposes with games being released down the road, especially if their launch window games suck, but hopefully as generational lines blur more and more this will cease to be a problem and therefore end the practice.

I also tend to associate excessive numbers of early game announcements with a failing console. At least from the N64 onward, as the systems plagued with this issue were the aforementioned N64, plus Gamecube, and Wii U.
With old consoles (NES/SNES), when a new game was “announced” in advance, it was because it was because magazines were reporting on a game already out in Japan and was excepted to make its way westward. I remember reading all about Square’s RPGs, and those never officially came out where I was growing up - and usually needed to pay premium to play them (converter + import fees, FF4, for example, cost something like 140 in 1992 USD, which is 300 USD today. If you really wanted the game from Japan, you could import it. But I’m getting off topic.

During the N64 era, Nintendo started announcing all their games in development years in advance, the sole exception was Diddy Kong Racing which was a mere 4 months. On the other side, Sony took a different focus saying things like “We have 200/500 games available right now on PlayStation, and we’re going to focus on showing you the most cool looking ones…” which made Playstation feel very presently in its golden age (200/500 games at the time was a lot, and to scale it to this generation, it would sound like 2000/5000 games). Nintendo’s golden age felt like a promise for the distant future - an age when really awesome games would start pouring out - but it always felt like it was getting further and further away, or a lie, when the promised great games started trickling out a lot later than expected, and not as big or interesting as promised. This went on for about 10 years across two Nintendo generations, until the Wii… when Nintendo started tightening up announcement to release dates from 2-3 years to under 10 months and focusing their attention on newly released games or games that would launch soon (on their weekly Wii/DS shows). Wii felt like a console living in its golden age. Things reverted briefly with the Wii U, it again, always felt like golden age of the console was way in the future - although, many of us began seeing Wii U as a stop-gap console, and that their next console (code named the NX) was where the big things would happen. And it did. Some Switch games have been announced long in advance, but they seem to be mostly related to the Wii U era way of thinking (Metroid Prime and Breath of the Wild 2/Tears of the Kingdom) as almost all new Nintendo games are announced no more than 8 months from their intended launch (so, not factoring in delays), sometimes on the day of release - day of launch announcements are my favourites.

Last edited by Jumpin - on 28 December 2023