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.As of 2025, there is no longer a good time to release a game. There are simply too many games coming out every day, so you’re always going to rub shoulders with something. That said, there are still bad times to release games, dictated no longer by the calendar but those drifting icebergs.This is why we saw so many developers playing four-dimensional checkers with their release dates this year, frantically hopping over one another to escape the terrifying bulk of those double-decker Kings. The first to arrive on the board was Grand Theft Auto 6. In 2024, Rockstar revealed that its hugely anticipated sequel would release sometime…
