Who cares, wait for a game to be out for many months before purchase. It will generally be more stable, and often on sale.
Most games these days have short marketing cycles. If you've played The Outer Worlds or Pillars of Eternity, you've got a very good idea of what this game is.
One is a first-person real-time RPG, so if you want to know what it plays like and what the size of that game is, it's The Outer Worlds. If you want to know what kind of fiction and tone it's set in, or what the mechanics of certain spells are, your point of reference is Pillars of Eternity.
Very disappointing if the only reason is competition. I don't really think that any Obsidian RPG is going to sell gangbusters, and there's not really any competition within the space, so if this is just Microsoft wanting to pad out their release schedule to keep people hooked on Game Pass, that's scummy as fuck.
Hopefully the extra time in the tank prevents the typically Obsidian jank from creeping in at least.
Whether or not theres competition in the genre, putting a release around the holiday schedule is usually a bad time for your game unless you are a top name in the industry. The most famous case being Titanfall 2 being sandwiched between CoD and Battlefield with Gears of War, Final Fantasy, Pokemon, and South Park releasing at similar times too. Titanfall was drowned out by relevant and irrelevant competition and was likely the best game in that holiday season. Simply delaying it to January could have been the difference between being forgotten and the next biggest franchise.
So yes, im for Avowed being pushed back
I mean, even despite that release date, Titanfall 2 sold 4 million copies that holiday season and is certainly remembered today more than Battlefield 1 or CoD: Infinite Warfare. The franchise has managed to continue through Apex Legends. Maybe delaying it would have caused it to sell a little bit better initially, but I think positive word of mouth gave it much longer legs.
Also...is anything actually releasing later this year that's worth pushing back for? Especially in the realm of RPGs? If anything pushing it back is going to cause it to conflict with Dragon Age Veilguard, which is also looking to be released very late 2024-early 2025, and is realistically the closest competition Avowed could run into. There's basically no other RPGs releasing this fall, so who's to say that it wouldn't get a ton of attention by being one of the only options in town?
