Can video game companies stop getting my hopes up?
The delay of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League has me wishing for companies to take a new approach to how they market video games in the world we now live in
I’ve been looking forward to the release of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League since it was announced in August of 2020. The premise alone was enough to earn my anticipation. Playing as the bad guys and killing the Justice League sounded like a refreshing change of pace in the superhero genre and left me with plenty of questions I couldn’t wait to answer upon playing the game.
Originally slated for a 2022 release, my excitement grew once the calendar turned to the new year. I didn’t know when within those 365 days the game would drop but I could sense the light at the end of the tunnel growing brighter.
And then… the same news that’s plagued a lot of games over the last nearly two years: The Suicide Squad game has been delayed until 2023. When in 2023? I have no idea, which only makes the news worse. Could be January. Could be November. Who knows?
This isn’t the first game to be delayed. It won’t be the last. But considering how much excitement I had for this game, in particular, I find myself particularly annoyed with a trend that could be handled a bit differently for sanity’s sake.
According to IGN, 60 games were delayed last year, and a handful of others have already faced the same fate in 2022.
I get why this is the case. The pandemic has companies adopting hybrid or work-from-home models. Without the resources and benefits that can come with everyone working under one roof at roughly the same time, the speed at which these games are being developed is much more inconsistent.
If this is the reality of video game development, then why aren’t companies adjusting to it? Why do they continue to set release dates or release years knowing their timeline could change in an instant?
I’m not a big fan of movies being announced years in advance. I don’t want to keep randomly thinking about it for that long. That’s space in my brain I’d love to use for more relevant stuff at the moment. I prefer to find out about a movie only a few months before it drops. Such scenarios are a pleasant surprise. Knowing the movie is so close gets me genuinely excited for its release.
Wouldn’t it be great if video game companies did the same? I know. They want to get people talking about the game as much as possible for as long as possible. That’s why our first look at SSKTJL came well before even just the year it was supposed to be released. All that built-up anticipation and trailer views and trending Twitter topics are worth the potential disappointment of a delay. Or so I assume the logic goes. But I think a potential delay comes at a cost that companies might want to consider now more than they ever have.
When a game gets delayed, the immediate assumption is that it’s for the better. More time to work on the game means more time to improve the game. There are expectations for a better product than what we otherwise would’ve gotten. Unfortunately, the correlation between time and quality isn’t always what we’d hope for. Marvel’s Avengers was still a buggy cash grab. Cyberpunk 2077 hardly functioned at all.
A game that turns out to be bad is disappointing, but a game that turns out to be bad after giving itself extra time in an attempt to be good is downright frustrating. What did you need all that extra time for? How worse was it going to be?
Companies rarely had to worry about this problem because there was a time not too long ago when they had no reason to think they’d have to push back the release of their game. But things have changed since then. The pandemic and the circumstances it’s forced upon us have delays feeling more inevitable than ever.
There’s no controlling all that, but you can control how you navigate through it and take us along for the ride. Catch us by surprise when the game is at the 1-yard line instead of dragging us along for a journey that has ups and downs I really don’t need to experience.
I’ll still buy the game, and my sanity will be better off with what I don’t know until I absolutely need to.