There are too many games with constantly slipping release dates.
In fact, it's starting to get ridiculous. In the Online RPG world, "Warhammer Online" was supposed to come out in 2006, and the new "World of Warcraft" expansion - "Wrath of the Lich King" - is still loitering around at Blizzard's headquarters, with nary a release date in site.
Meanwhile, "Sims 2" expansion after "Sims 2" expansion gets cranked out, but Maxis still can't get "Spore" finished and out the door - which is a shame, because the concept looks great. Where else does the player get to shepherd the history of an entire species, from microbes to space travel?
Release date? Who knows?
It's not like the FPS world is doing any better. If Valve's "Left 4 Dead" misses it's release date, no one is going to be surprised. After all, it was supposed to be six months between "Half-Life 2" episodes, yet "The Orange Box" with "Episode 2" came out more than three years after the original game.
It's actually starting to be a problem with the PC gaming industry. While console release dates do slip, they don't slip this badly. "Halo 3" pretty much came out when Bungie and Microsoft said it would. Of course, one thing the console world is less prone to doing is announcing release dates.
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That is the crux of the problem, and the PC-gaming industry really needs to knock it off. It's effectively shooting itself - not in the foot, but somewhere higher-up and closer to the centerline. It makes it look bad. It's not as if the industry needed any help. The high cost of entry to top-end PC gaming is quite expensive. Even though most games can be played with lower graphics settings, most people would rather buy a console and the console versions of the game - because, of course, there always is a console version these days - and play it at full quality without buying a $1,500 computer. So, by announcing release dates, yet totally failing to stick to them, the developers are driving the masses towards the console side of gaming.
The worst part of the problem is that at least half of the companies developing for the PC are also developing console games. They don't seem to have slipping release date issues for "Madden" and its ilk - just the opposite.
It's a problem that needs to be fixed if the PC game industry is to survive in the face of growing competition from consoles. A good place to start would be to stop giving out release dates. The developers need to be absolutely sure they can hit them before even a release year is announced.
Also, there need to be more PC exclusives like "Crysis." Due to that game's shockingly high graphics requirements, it will never come out on any of the consoles available today. People have to have a reason to spend $1,500 on a game computer. A game that pushes the boundaries of graphic capabilities is one of those reasons. Technological superiority is the ace card that the PC holds, but if the games keep failing to come out, no one will care.
