In the comments section of a recent post on the official PlayStation Blog, Sony’s Ron Eagle explained the reason why Killzone 2 has been pushed back yet again, this time to February 2009. Apparently, it was “a pure management decision” to avoid competition with other first-party Sony shooters.
videogaming247 discovered this amidst the comments on a Sony Judges’ Day post about Killzone 2:
Ron Eagle replied on May 20, 2008 at 11:27 am
Just wanted to add a quick reply on the “delay” of Killzone 2 to Feb 2009. To be clear, there is nothing wrong or causing a delay to the development of the title. We (SECA) had to look at the fall calendar with SOCOM, LittleBigPlanet, MotorStorm: Pacific Rift, Resistance 2, plus some PSN titles and make a decision where each game should come out. Killzone 2 was moved to Feb 2009 to make sure we didn’t have three shooters in the marketplace competing for retail dollars during the same holiday season. The game will be great and it will be out in Feb 2009 in both Europe and North America.
Hope this helps - alot of times we gamers read delay and think something is wrong, in this case, it was a pure management decision.
While I certainly won’t even attempt to infer that there are any problems with Killzone 2, I find Sony’s claim amusing. Eagle claims they’re worried about competition among their own shooters, even when there are only three of them. Just this March, EEDAR analyst Jesse Divnich pointed out that the market can support multiple triple-A shooters in the same month, much less the entire holiday season.
I think it’s far more likely they don’t want their titles to compete with all the other shooters coming out this season — Dead Space, Fallout 3, Left 4 Dead, Project Origin, Gears of War 2, etc. — but since none of these titles are exclusive to the PS3, mentioning them would of course be counterproductive to the PR effort.
I have no background in economics, but I wonder — if Sony were to intentionally release their exclusives within a short period of time, instead of spacing them out to the point that games are finished, shelved and forgotten by the time the next arrives, might that not send a message to consumers that a PS3 is worth the investment?
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