Shadow dropping a videogame is the shittiest thing that you've seen in the industry lately? Really? Lmao. I can probably think of a dozen of things worse than shadow dropping a videogame in this industry. I sympathise with some developers but at the same time, I don't think there's anything wrong with shadow dropping from a morality perspective, it's a competition at the end of the day and this is a marketing tactic and in times where marketing budgets are horrifically high, shadow dropping can get around some of that.
I doubt even the developer of Expedition 33 is taking this as seriously as you are. Both titles are doing brilliantly with their performance in players and sales, so clearly the fear about launching them near each other was massively overblown, even by myself, which suggests there was enough of a difference in their fanbase or simply enough of an audience for both. The games don't cease to exist after launch either, not everything has to sell 10m+ on day one, those playing E33 will eventually get around to Oblivion and those playing Oblivion will eventually get around to E33.
Oblivion Remaster has been rumoured to shadow drop for months, its April 21st week was leaked at the start of April so leakers already knew the date for at least almost a month but who is to say that Microsoft didn't tell the E33 team months ago when they were planning on releasing Oblivion Remaster too? Especially since it had a Game Pass deal and featured predominately on Xbox showcases. I think it's not unlikely that E33 team knew about Oblivion's date before the leakers as publishers sometimes communicate this stuff with each other to avoid certain situations like this.
And what if they knew but decided to go ahead anyway? It's risky but there's examples of developers not giving a shit about this even without shadow drops, Respawn famously chose to release Titanfall 2 between Call of Duty and Battlefield despite people blaming EA for it, that backfired but it didn't stop other developers from never doing it again, Take-Two released The Outer Worlds literally on the same day as Call of Duty and it worked out good for The Outer Worlds. There's simply going to be times when games launch on top of each other. We also don't know what Microsoft paid for E33 on Game Pass and any "lost copies" of those interested in E33 but now busy with Oblivion will only be temporary.
Last edited by Ryuu96 - on 27 April 2025
