The Revolving Door Into Summer

Somewhat to my surprise, I don't appear to have posted about Wuthering Waves for a couple of weeks. I don't want to give the impression I'm not playing the game any more or even that I've forgotten about it altogether. That would be entirely incorrect. I've just had too much else to write about. There's so much going on in gaming this summer.

Seriously, though, isn't there? Syp posted about it last week, name-checking expansions for Final Fantasy XIV, Elder Scrolls Online, Guild Wars 2 and World of Warcraft. He also mentioned the Tarisland launch, as did both I and Wilhelm (Who was less than impressed.)

Wilhelm also reminded us of another major MMORPG getting a global launch this summer, namely Throne and Liberty, the not-a-sequel to whatever version of Lineage came out last. That one doesn't actually launch until the middle of September but there's a short open beta in July and anyway September is still summer, the way some people reckon it.

Then there's the Anashti Sul server Darkpaw just spun up for EverQuest II and not one but two fresh "Legendary" servers arriving in Lord of the Rings Online next month, all aimed at the surprisingly large number of people still interested in starting over for the umpteenth time in the same games they played years ago, a demographic that apparently no longer includes either Wilhelm or me, at least as far as EQII is concerned.

I could go on. For example, there's Pax Dei, a game I have no interest in but which a lot of people seemed to be very excited about, at least until the developers made the mistake of letting people play it. So many games make that cardinal error. Palworld has its first really big update scheduled to land just three days from now, the same day as the Steam Summer Sale...

Had enough? Because there's plenty more. EVE just launched an expansion. Once Human goes live on 9 July. Even Raph Koster is up to something...

What is it with the summer? Looking just at the games and events I've mentioned, I get the point of a summer launch window for some of them. I'm guessing the demographic interested in playing Tarisland, Throne and Liberty and maybe Palworld probably skews towards school and college age. 

The rest, though? Don't these people have jobs? Do they really take the summer off to play games?

It's almost as though the developers think it's still the 'nineties or the early 2000s, when most people over twenty-five couldn't have told you the name of any video game, unless Hollywood had made a movie out of it. And even then all they'd really be able to say about it would be that the movie was terrible. 

Back then, it probably did make sense to push everything at kids on their long summer break. Catch them when they were all sitting at home, the empty weeks stretching out ahead, nothing to do to kill the boredom but play video games... not to mention their parents, frazzled and flustered, ready to throw a few dollars at anything that might keep the little darlings off their backs for a while.

The world isn't like that any more, is it? Everyone plays games now, grown-ups included. Gaming's not just kids' stuff any more. Or so I'm led to believe.

Yesterday, I watched a recent episode of a mainstream TV quz show in which two contestants in their sixties were asked to identify famous video games from the name of one of the main characters and the initial  letters of the words in the game's title. They couldn't do it but the mere fact the producers thought it was a reasonable question to ask shows how far towards the mainstream video-gaming has moved over the last twenty years.

Some of it is just perception bias, of course. Games don't all come out in the summer. New games and expansions arrive year-round. The carousel never stops spinning. Still, there does seem to be some old thinking behind a lot of the scheduling choices. 

It's long seemed like an odd practice to me and this current glut really draws attention to it. As an adult in employment, I've often thought the time I'd really appreciate some good, new titles and expansions would be the long, dark, inhospitable evenings of winter and early spring. From the New Year until Easter. That's when I get home from work and fins myself with time on my  hands. 

It's also the very slot that did so well for Valheim and Palworld, neither of which I might have found time for had they arrived in the summer. Is it a co-incidence there've been so many unexpected hits around that time of year?

The other big launch window of the year, late November through early December, is even worse for me, although that does have a lot to do with the commercial sector in which I work. It's when I'm at my busiest, with the least interest in - and time for - playing games. Summer may not be ideal for staying inside staring at a screen - at least not when we get some decent weather as we are right now - but it's certainly better for me than right before Christmas.

Then again, if I lived in one of the parts of the world where it's too hot to go outdoors in the summer until after dark and I had good-quality air-conditioning, I guess I might be happy to have something to keep me entertained while I hid from the big burning ball in the sky. 

Where I live, warm, dry sunny days are so rare it feels positively ungrateful to sit indoors when one happens to come along, let alone if there's a whole week of good weather (Fanciful idea, I know...) I sometimes forget it's not like that for everyone. We all look at things from our own perspective too much, sometimes.

And that was a somewhat over-extended introduction to the post about Wuthering Waves I was planning to write but no longer have time for. I ought to keep it in mind for that bit of Blaugust where we share our blogging tips, the specific tip in this case being "Don't do what I just did".

Had I stuck to the script, I would have extemporized on how I'm still playing WW and on what a very good game it's turning out to be. I even had some specific examples in mind, drawn from my many hours of play, ready to drive the point home.

Now I guess all of that will have to wait for next time, assuming I can keep my mind on the job then.

At least I got to use a few of the hundreds of screenshots I've taken so far so I guess my afternoon hasn't been entirely wasted...