It’s amazing to think that with the huge success of Halo 4 and Call of Duty last year that the gaming industry is still down, but the last quarter hasn’t been able to bring it completely out of the doldrums.
Games have always been a very up and down business, and it looks like things have been on the rebound, just maybe not fast enough.
The big daddy game this year will be GTA V, but now the news has come down that it will be held up until this September. Originally the game was going to be out this spring, but as the Take-Two has released a statement saying the hold up is “to allow additional development time.”
As reporter Ben Fritz of the Los Angeles Times points out, delays for the GTA franchise have happened before. Part IV was held up from October 2007 to April 2008, and their other big franchise, Bioshock, got held up from last October, then this February, and now it’s slated for March.
The announcement of this delay caused Take-Two’s stocks to drop 7%, and right now the biz could use a big blockbuster. GTA V should definitely deliver when it’s finally ready, and there’s also tons of other big games coming this year as well that should help pick up the slack, including the aforementioned Bioshock,
This year, games should also come under more fire with the debate over gun control, and GTA is no stranger to controversy in this regard. Yet in the case of GTA, there’s probably no such thing as bad publicity, so Take-Two should definitely prepare themselves for a lot of angry parents and government officially denouncing the game’s violence, which of course should stoke sales even further.
Delays aside, MTV also notes us that GTA V does now have an official release date. Baring force majeure, look for GTA V on September 17, 2013. The GTA Team also promised, “it will be worth the extra time. GTA V is a massively ambitious and complex game and it simply needs a little more polish to be of the standard we and, more importantly, you require.”
