Letter from the Editor: Feast and famine
Letter from the Editor is a new monthly column from our editor – a bit like the editorial on the first page of a magazine! – that’s exclusive to all Eurogamer supporters.
In a way, this month’s column is an extension of what I talked about in the first letter last month: what constitutes a busy release schedule and what doesn’t. Back then, I was musing on the contrast between 2021’s meagre lineup of big releases and the parade of positive reviews of mostly smaller games we have run recently. (Indeed, in the weeks since I wrote that, we’ve added two more Essentials and Stephen Totilo’s Axios Gaming newsletter did us the honour of undertaking a statistical analysis of our reviewing – complete with graph! – pointing out that we’ve equalled 2020’s tally of Essentials with fewer games reviewed overall and two months still to go in the year.)
What’s on my mind this month is something rather more concrete: those pain points, if pain is an appropriate word, that happen when a glut of new releases pile on top of each other. Right now, quiet year or not, we’re starting down the barrel of a frantic fortnight in early November. It kicks off with the new Call of Duty and a major Animal Crossing update on the same day; then – in the space of a week – we get Football Manager 22, Forza Horizon 5, two major re-releases on the same day (GTA Trilogy and Skyrim Anniversary Edition), the Elden Ring public test and Shin Megami Tensei 5; and just one week later, new Battlefield and Pokémon games.
If that sounds bad (or good!), then allow me to introduce you to February 2022. After Elden Ring’s short delay, it now looks like this: Dying Light 2, Horizon: Forbidden West, a Destiny 2 expansion, Elden Ring and the Saints Row reboot on the same day to finish the month, and Gran Turismo 7 in the first week of March as a chaser. Oh, so that’s where all 2021’s big games went.
1 of 4 Caption Attribution February-March 2022. What will you pick?
Moments like these are exciting of course, but for those of us covering games professionally they cause a degree of groaning and eye-rolling. Video games can be big, unwieldy things that take dozens of hours to play, and covering these games can be a sprawling undertaking too, involving multiple members of staff, with a review, videos, guides and tech coverage to marshall and schedule. A consideration in recent years is that a major update to a popular live game can be just as significant as a new release; the upcoming Animal Crossing update could revive interest in what was arguably 2020’s biggest game, while the changes to Warzone will probably be more newsworthy than anything that’s actually in the main Call of Duty: Vanguard package. When releases pile up like this, things get very hectic for us, and though there’s an undeniable buzz to it, we could be forgiven for wanting to spread the workload – and the web traffic – around a little bit.
