Once upon a time, choosing when to release your videogame was simple. If you were a major publisher, you put your game on shelves between one and three months before Christmas. If you were a midsize or indie developer, by contrast, you released your game anywhere that wasn't the holiday season. Anywhere except for summer, that is. Nobody released games in the summer, because received wisdom suggested that everyone would be outside.
Around 10 years ago, however, things started to change. Too many big games began releasing around Christmas, so major publishers wanting to escape the squeeze started releasing games between February and April. But then those months became overcrowded, too, so big games started landing in May and even June. Indie developers, meanwhile, increasingly struggled to keep their heads above water, trapped between those drifting triple-A icebergs and Steam's relentless torrent of New Releases.
Then Rockstar revealed GTA 6 would be delayed into May 2026. Developers releasing this year beathed a huge sigh of relief, while studios eyeing the first half of 2026 began tugging at their collars. But this wasn't the end of the story, as GTA 6 was pushed back again to November 2026, sending yet more shockwaves into the future, though some developers, like Devolver Digital, have committed to releasing alongside Rockstar's commercial megalith.
But Grand Theft Auto 6 wasn't the only big game to send other developers running for cover in 2025. After years of silence which, counter intuitively, led to hype levels of ludicrous proportions, Team Cherry emerged from the shadows and formally announced the release date for Hollow Knight: Silksong, which was just a couple of weeks after said announcement.
The effect was like dropping a bomb into the release calendar, with games like Demonschool and Baby Steps scrambling to get out of the blast zone. Team Cherry even recently apologised for causing such a hubbub. Some companies, like Atari, decided to stick it out, releasing Adventure of Samsara alongside Team Cherry's metroidvania. It did not go well.
But at least Team Cherry gave people some warning, unlike Microsoft when it shadow dropped Oblivion Remastered in April. This caused serious problems for indie developers releasing around the same time. The developer of western point and click Rosewater said they noticed "a complete stop in game sales from about 2pm onward on Oblivion day", while Caves of Qud creator Brian Bucklew said the overhaul "gave us like a 10-20% haircut on daily revenue".
While shadow dropping a game of such magnitude might be considered bad manners, Microsoft isn't beholden to warn other studios when releasing its games. And nothing would have stopped Oblivion Remastered from causing ripples wherever it landed. Indeed, short of the industry agreeing to release exactly one game per day, I don't see what the solution is. If anything, the problem is likely to get worse as the number of games released on Steam grows every year, and major games cause an increasing number of knock-on effects as release schedules bounce around like a pinball.
The question, therefore, is which games will developers scramble to escape from in 2026. Certainly, Grand Theft Auto 6 will continue to bend developmental spacetime, especially if its release date moves again. Elsewhere, I don't think anyone will want to get in the way of Resident Evil: Requiem, which releases on February 27. As for games without release dates yet, I don't think anything has Silksong levels of hype behind it, though I reckon Fable could cause some calendar crises if Microsoft deems it ready for launch next year.
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