Wednesday 18 September 2013

I Don't Understand Midnight Launches

Recently Grand Theft Auto 5 got released and the release of this game is easily one of the biggest things to happen in gaming this year.  The amount of hype people have for this game is astounding and while I don't share quite the same amount of excitement, I am looking forward to eventually picking it up and playing it through.

So I'm not here to pass judgement on the quality of the game but I really don't understand this whole midnight release stuff.  I went to a midnight release once, for Modern Warfare 2, and it was shit.  I went down to the local GAME store with my buddies from university and we were surrounded on all sides by idiots and there was a thick smell of weed in the air, it was most unpleasant.  Even then when I eventually got it home I thought that I couldn't really enjoy it all that much because I was tired so I ended up playing it in the morning anyway and if I was going to do that I didn't need to go to the midnight release at all.

It's not like the stores are going to run out of pre order copies anyway, they realise how much of these big title games they need to get in and how many orders they need to meet so it's not like your pre order is just going to vanish over the course of 2 hours at midnight and they aren't going to sell it off either if the store is any good.

Also GTA5 was released on a Tuesday which makes the whole thing even more confusing to me.  Sure, if it's a Friday midnight release at least you can stay up all night and recover on Saturday, but surely a great deal of people who went to go grab GTA as early as possible have jobs or school or some kind of mid week responsibility?  So wouldn't that mean one wouldn't have all that much time to play it anyway?  I don't get why these people can't just wait a few days or whatever and then really sink their teeth into it.  With a game with this much hype you'd think that's what people would want to do.

Still, who am I to judge? I'm sure there were plenty of happy customers that day and a great majority are enjoying the game right now.  For me, if GTA5 turns out to be anything like GTA4 I'm going to be underwhelmed and disappointed but like I said, no judgement until I have a copy.

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