What has happened to all the video games?

gamesindustry.biz:

Christopher Dring

Head of Games B2B

Wednesday 15th June 2022

There was a sense of optimism at the start of 2022 that this was going to be a banner year for video games.

The first few months were full of major releases: Pokémon, Elden Ring, Horizon, Gran Turismo, Dying Light, to name just a handful. And although the slate beyond that was uncertain, there were some big titles due over the year. The two biggest (outside of annual titles like Call of Duty) was Starfield and The Legend of Zelda.

But both games have been delayed, the release schedule has dried up, and the majority of game reveals over the last month have been for titles due in 2023. It's not true to say there is nothing coming out this year, but there is little on a scale that media owners and retailers were hoping for.

So what's going on? Ask any developer and they'll tell you that we're witnessing the repercussions of COVID-19. Yet with the movie and TV industry continuing to deliver major releases, what is it about games that means we're still struggling some two years since the pandemic started?

Starfield was set to be one of the biggest games this Christmas, it's now due in 2023

Earlier this month we interviewed Sega's Two Point Studios, a 40-person developer that had delayed (from May to August) its upcoming simulation game: Two Point Campus. In the interview the studio revealed that once they got to the business end of releasing the game, they realised things weren't quite as they had expected. And that some of the issues that would usually have been fixed during development hadn't been.

"We lost the meerkat thing [with remote working]," says studio director Gary Carr. "Because if someone's swearing at your level over there, or someone's moaning about a