Pre-publication publishing.

Schrödinger's Release Date

It's last Sunday evening, October 25th, and, like any other Sunday evening, I sit down and open up the shared document that GWJ writers use to put together our The Week Ahead post. I'll edit some of the writing that's already been put in, and then I'll scroll to the bottom and check our release list for accuracy. Occasionally, I'll pick a game or two to shine some light on.

Sounds easy enough, and yet I spend hours on it.

In the sepia-toned memory of a time before the re-releases of the original Star Wars trilogy, games came on physical media, in physical boxes, and arrived in physical stores promptly at a time that everyone expected, because it had been published in one of the handful of national or international tree-corpse magazines that covered contemporary video games.

Then again, when you look behind your memory's Instagram filter, the truth was never quite so overexposed and sepia-toned as you thought.

We all at least have some notion of how game releases used to work: Developers deliver final code to publisher. Publisher prints, packages and ships physical media. You pick up Bug City 2000 at your local Electronics Boutique or Elek-Tek, bring it home, and never expect the code to change.

By the time the code left the developer it was as dead and fixed as a moth pinned under the word "Lepidoptera" in your 8th grade science project. The good old days, when games were games and releases were released – my, how things have changed.

But in reality, a lot of games that had firm, public release dates missed their deadlines – as they still do. Maybe the code got to the publisher in time to start pressing discs, disks or cartridges, but perhaps with insufficient lead time, and we would walk out of Babbage's with instructions to come back next week or, if lucky, a promise that we'd get a phone call when more copies came in.

A few days later, we'd answer our novelty-shaped landline phones or be listening to the playback on our answering machines, and there would be our call from the store. We'd race to the mall (remember those?), and burn sub–$1 gas to get back home as fast as we could. And then the game wouldn't work. Maybe the next publishing run would include a fix. Maybe you could register your copy and they'd mail you a floppy disk. Maybe you could find a solution on a BBS or … Prodigy? If it doesn't work on my machine, maybe they'll put out a (shudder) port?

I mean, this can't be it, can it? Am I going to have to try and return it to the store, promising I hadn't just brought it home, copied it, and brought it back?

Sometimes clear lines on publications were our worst enemies, and the idea that the game wasn't done being published was our most ardent hope.

As I sit down to edit the next day's The Week Ahead on October 25th, I find contradicting information about release dates, as I often do. As I fact-check, Monster High: New Ghoul in School is getting listed as releasing October 27th. The game's own Twitter account says November. Their website says merely "Coming soon!" But merchants are saying they'll ship on Oct. 27, so we're going to list it here. Thankfully, I pick what turns out to be the right source to trust (online retailers), but, you know, usually I find the publisher to be a pretty reliable source on this sort of thing. Come November, I'm still seeing sites reporting the release date as "TBA."

That doesn't even get into the Steam mud. SinaRun, to take an example off the top of last week's list, was coming out of Greenlight and Early Access on October 26th, so this is the final edition, though that's probably subject to patching, and maybe expansions later on, if it does well.

But coming out of Early Access means the game was already out there and available to players to give money and receive game. There's also a "Classic" version of the game out there somewhere, just to throw a little more mud in the water.

Pathologic has been available on PC, in one way or another, for a decade, but is being re-released with bug fixes and updated graphics as a sideline to the remake due November 2016. Such edition-tracking on one platform makes it almost seem quaint to worry about the old question of "is this a port?" that gamers used to ask. Zoombinis is a port from iOS and Android, and while that distinction is meaningful – it lets players know that the game was originally designed and built within the limitations of its original, mobile platforms – at least I can definitively say when the game will be out on PC, because all the sources seem to agree.

It turns out this isn't just a software issue, either. If it's something that gets "published," it's prone to versioning, fixes, and republication in the same or new formats.

Walt Whitman's Leaves Of Grass was published as seven different editions within his lifetime, and even that number has a few extra "maybes" to add. Sometimes Whitman and/or his publishers changed poems, changed the order, added or removed poems or parts of poems. Sometimes changes were made due to audience feedback, or Whitman's mood, the political climate, or just fixing an error.

People make careers out of tracking, documenting and trying to explain all this stuff.

If you want to cite a Shakespeare play, some would-be wordsmythe is likely to ask you which version you're talking about – it doesn't help that much of what we think of as the Bard's work was performed before being published, and some of the plays we have were reconstituted and transcribed from memory, rather than Billy Shakes just having it all typeset and printed from the start. And then – get this – the versions of Shakespeare that we read in school might not be any given one of those transcriptions. There are editions that combine multiple sources into some perceived "best" version – maybe "what Shakespeare was trying to make," or "the most metrically consistent," or even "translated for modern audiences."

At some point, it's not even worth holding up your nose at the DiCaprio / Danes film – which, itself a version of the Shakespeare play, was released in theaters on a different date in just about every country (with or without localization), was edited to run on premium cable, was again edited and released on VHS and DVD, and then was re-released in a handful of countries (including just last year in South Korea). Were all those releases the same format? Might your memory be of the edited version to fit on a standard-def TV, or to play on an airplane?

Honestly, I mostly just remember the soundtrack.

I guess it's all complicated, and it looks like it always has been. But if you have any ideas on how we can best untie this knot for the Week Ahead release lists here at GWJ, I'd love to hear them.

Comments

Crowd source it.

garion333 wrote:

Crowd source it.

My thoughts exactly. Even in the days of physical, "no, this is the one and only version, really guys" media, there were still plenty of fan patches and mods. Every Trokia game ever made comes to mind.

Does that mean you two are volunteering?

I'm volunteering the crowd.

Is there another well known site that lists game releases? Back in the day Gone Gold listed stuff, and I read about releases in Game Informer (although as it is a GameStop publication, they may have more inside info). I don't visit any other site that publishes releases on a week to week basis. If there is, there may be more insight to be found. Otherwise I agree with croudsourcing the process.

The problem with crowdsourcing tends to be that the crowd is only interested in sourcing what they're interested in, and a lot of these release lists contain hidden gems or obscure unknowns.

Note that I say "tends to be", not "definitively happens 100% of the time". But Wikipedia technically is crowd-sourced and that doesn't even have consistent/accurate/up-to-date information.

I haven't encountered any other lists maintained with the level of care and detail as the GWJ Week Ahead - most that I have seen seem to be maintained on a "when we feel like it" basis. Thanks to all who make this happen, it's a valuable and beloved feature of the site as far as I'm concerned. Wish I had a brilliant idea for making it less heavy lifting - seems like a hybrid of collaborative crowdsourcing and editorial oversight would be ideal, though likely cumbersome to implement in practice.

So, my crowd sourcing suggestion could be flushed out a bit. I said it, mostly, because we already partially crowd source it after the article gets posted. To make wordy's life easier, maybe The List should be posted sometimes over the weekend (or earlier) maybe on the forums, maybe in a Google doc, etc. and then people can respond to make fixes, omissions, etc.

The idea here isn't to get the list perfect, because that would be impossible. If wordy can come up with a basic list and then people get some time to add in their knowledge I would think it would save wordy a lot of time. Or be a bigger headache. lol

ccesarano wrote:

The problem with crowdsourcing tends to be that the crowd is only interested in sourcing what they're interested in, and a lot of these release lists contain hidden gems or obscure unknowns.

Note that I say "tends to be", not "definitively happens 100% of the time". But Wikipedia technically is crowd-sourced and that doesn't even have consistent/accurate/up-to-date information.

Well, of course the crowd will have their own interests, but that's also true of wordy and everyone writing in the front page articles, which is fine. I think we have a wide enough crowd here to get most of the releases on the front page correct. Some of us follow other genres more than others so find out immediately when X gets delayed for two weeks, etc. And whoever wants to spend time tracking Steam's releases is more than welcome to do so.

I just want to own up to the fact that Wordsmythe's herculean efforts to vet the list are largely my fault. I assemble the list and the sources I use aren't reliable enough (neither are the sources I use when I do my pass to vet the list).

I'll keep trying to do better, so maybe it won't take so many hours to vet.

Sorry everyone, and especially Wordsmythe!

garion333 wrote:

Well, of course the crowd will have their own interests, but that's also true of wordy and everyone writing in the front page articles, which is fine. I think we have a wide enough crowd here to get most of the releases on the front page correct. Some of us follow other genres more than others so find out immediately when X gets delayed for two weeks, etc. And whoever wants to spend time tracking Steam's releases is more than welcome to do so. :P

If we do crowdsource, I imagine doing it as a forum thread would probably be ideal. Put the latest list up in the Original Post, then follow comments and make edits as people check and research and provide feedback.

And yes, everyone is biased to tastes. Time as well. Sometimes I have a free enough morning to just YouTube that long list of PC indie games. Other times I just cannot be bothered.

I wonder if you could develop a bot that could crawl across the Internet and find release dates for games? Not that conflicting information would help at all, but still... might be a nifty project.

Well, when I was talking about crowdsourcing I was talking about the list, not the writeups. I fully expect you guys to write up the posts.

doubtingthomas396 wrote:

I just want to own up to the fact that Wordsmythe's herculean efforts to vet the list are largely my fault. I assemble the list and the sources I use aren't reliable enough (neither are the sources I use when I do my pass to vet the list).

I'll keep trying to do better, so maybe it won't take so many hours to vet.

Sorry everyone, and especially Wordsmythe!

I don't blame you. I blame developers and publishers that are bad about publishing reliable information about when people can buy their product.

I heard that Schrödinger's Release Date can both exist and not exist at the same time.

RamblinRob wrote:

I heard that Schrödinger's Release Date can both exist and not exist at the same time.

Sorry if it wasn't clear, but that's exactly what I'm getting at. It exists in a state of uncertainty until you collapse the probability by arriving at the suspected date.

wordsmythe wrote:
RamblinRob wrote:

I heard that Schrödinger's Release Date can both exist and not exist at the same time.

Sorry if it wasn't clear, but that's exactly what I'm getting at. It exists in a state of uncertainty until you collapse the probability by arriving at the suspected date.

That's what I get for not reading first. Just saw the title and made what is now a failed joke.

RamblinRob wrote:
wordsmythe wrote:
RamblinRob wrote:

I heard that Schrödinger's Release Date can both exist and not exist at the same time.

Sorry if it wasn't clear, but that's exactly what I'm getting at. It exists in a state of uncertainty until you collapse the probability by arriving at the suspected date.

That's what I get for not reading first. Just saw the title and made what is now a failed joke.

So in a sense you made a Schrödinger's Joke in that it is both funny and not funny at the same time depending on the individuale.