December is, without a doubt, the worst time to release a triple-A game. The Game Awards, otherwise known as the Geoff Keighley Show, is the only gaming awards show that mainstream players care about. Every game nominated, especially for Game of the Year, which is incidentally also the only category most mainstream gamers care about, inevitably gets buzz that translates to sales.
But famously, The Game Awards’ timing makes absolutely no sense. While most award shows are held in January or later, because every game in a given year needs to be considered, TGA takes place in December. Its eligibility cutoff is in mid to late November, and games released after that date are only eligible for the following year.
While this is technically a fair workaround, nobody ever remembers to nominate the games released in December the previous year. That’s just the way the cookie crumbles. Recency bias also plays a part – by the time November rolls around, the games played nearly a year ago are already forgotten. Even the games released in January get short shrift. I’ll get into examples later, but Midnight Suns, anyone?
Could The Great Circle Have Made It To A GOTY Nom?
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle was released on December 9, three days before The Game Awards aired. I’m reluctant to go on record at this point in saying that it could have earned a GOTY nomination, considering I haven’t finished the game yet, but goddamn, it’s good. I have my own reservations about this year’s GOTY noms – I don’t think Black Myth: Wukong should have been nominated, nor Shadow of the Erdtree – but I’m not certain that The Great Circle would have been able to muscle in on the category regardless.
My Game of the Year list looked quite different from The Game Awards’, but that’s par for the course.
That said, I do think that The Great Circle would have been nominated for something. We’re already seeing it rightfully getting acknowledged at other award shows, specifically the D.I.C.E. Awards, one of the most prestigious shows in the industry.
The Great Circle got nods for its art direction, characters and storytelling, technical capabilities, and was nominated for Adventure Game of the Year and Game of the Year on top of that. That’s no small feat, especially considering Xbox has been on the back foot for years now and has been doing fairly poorly with its other exclusives.
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The Impact Of A December Release Date
While the DICE Awards is arguably a more prestigious event than the showboaty, extended marketing reel that is The Game Awards, and it’s been around much longer, it’s not paid quite as much attention. TGA is the gaming event of the year, whether we like it or not (and we don’t). The fact remains that if you’re looking to pick up buzz from TGA hype, a December release date makes that basically impossible. It’ll be forgotten, especially if, god forbid, Grand Theft Auto 6 actually comes out next year.
We’ve seen this happen time and time again. Marvel’s Midnight Suns, which reviewed well, was a commercial flop, largely because it was released in December. Some members of TheGamer (okay, just Eric Switzer) maintain that Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora was a victim of its release date, as well. December just isn’t a good time to release a video game anymore – they inevitably slip through the cracks.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, despite being a great game – the best Xbox exclusive in years, really – will probably slip through the cracks, too. Hell, by the time February rolls around and we’re hit with four major releases (Avowed, Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, and Civilization 7), we’ll already have tossed it aside. That’s a crying shame. You should play it now, before you forget it exists.
Uncover one of history’s greatest mysteries in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle™, a first-person, single-player adventure set between the events of Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade. The year is 1937, sinister forces are scouring the globe for the secret to an ancient power known as the Great Circle, and only one person can stop them – Indiana Jones. You’ll become the legendary archaeologist in this cinematic action-adventure game from MachineGames, the award winning studio behind the recent Wolfenstein series, and executive produced by Hall of Fame game designer Todd Howard.