Why Video Game Release Dates Get Announced So Early

As the modern gamer knows all too well, video games can be fickle. You can wait for years for a game, only for it to be delayed again—sometimes, the final product isn’t even worth it. Video games can sometimes follow unique marketing and rollout strategies not shared by their film, TV, or literary counterparts: games can be revealed several years before their official launch, sometimes as much as a decade before. The typical strategy seems a game revealed and released within a year, but delays do happen, and some games have much longer cycles.

Why do video game companies do this? Why, for instance, would Bethesda announce The Elder Scrolls 6 back in 2018, only to say virtually nothing else about the game in the seven years since? The obvious answer is hype-building, keeping players on the hook, even if a game is far away from completion. That answer is predicated on the assumption that these announcements are for gamers, but given the most vocal voices in gaming tend to disavow this practice of premature reveals, you may be curious as to why it still happens. The truth is: it happens because these announcements are not for you.

The Real Reason Games Are Announced So Early

Notable AAA Games That Are Still Unreleased, Despite Being Announced Years Ago

• Grand Theft Auto 6
• The Elder Scrolls 6
• Project Orion (Cyberpunk 2077 sequel)
• Star Wars Eclipse
• Mass Effect 4

Publishers Rely On Investors to Keep the Lights On

Gamers may be the ones forking over their hard-earned cash for the latest and greatest releases, but such releases typically can’t come to fruition if not for shareholders. Video games can’t make money until they are released, but they take several years to get from inception to launch, during which time the developer is essentially bleeding money. In the case of larger developers like Rockstar Games and Bethesda Game Studios, game development is funded by their respective parent companies, which are funded by individual investors, hedge funds, and private equity firms.

Let’s look at GTA 6 as an example: Rockstar’s publisher, Take-Two Interactive, is a public company whose largest shareholders are The Vanguard Group and Blackrock—two of the largest investment companies on the planet. These companies aren’t investing millions of dollars in Take-Two out of altruism; they are looking for a return on investment. In a publicly traded company, this return comes from the growth of the stock, upon which game hype has the most material impact. A game like GTA 6 doesn’t need hype for word-of-mouth marketing, it needs hype to attract investors and keep them on the line.

Take-Two’s stock will probably skyrocket once GTA 6 launches, likely even swelling over the year afterward, translating to massive profits for shareholders like Blackrock. But this same philosophy applies to games from private companies as well. Cyberpunk 2077 is a great example of this: revealed in 2013 and released in late 2020, Cyberpunk is often cited as one of the most infamous instances of a company revealing its game too early. Most likely, at least part of the motivation for this early reveal was likely to drum up investor interest, gathering funding so that CDPR’s vision could become a reality. It may seem backwards, but usually, a developer has to make its game seem great before they can actually start working on it in earnest.

Of course, there are a number of other factors that impact the development timeline as well. Management issues, world events, economic downturn, and, in cases like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. developer GSC Game World, real-world warfare, can all result in a game taking longer than expected to reach the finish line. It’s a multifaceted industry, but as is often the case, money is the biggest motivator. Building confidence with shareholders thereby plays a pivotal role in getting a game off the ground, and since it takes longer than ever to develop a game, it seems likely extremely early reveals could become even more commonplace.