We sometimes forget how different video games are from the rest of modern media. They feel like the same thing - they’re mass marketed entertainment products, where the biggest budget and best known IP gets adverts on TV and buses, while the most committed fans know of the smaller hidden gems. They launch throughout the year, wary of not going head to head with major competition, but also have algorithmically determined cycles that lead to peaks and troughs. But video games are very different and behind the scenes, they’re very stupid.
Yesterday,Tony Todd revealed that Spider-Man 2 would be dropping in September some time.Todd voices Venom in the game, and so has a pretty good handle on when it’s supposed to come out. September is six months away, and I can already tell you that The Expendables 4, The Equalizer 3, Next Goal Wins, and The Book of Clarence will be in theatres that month. The month after brings Kraven the Hunter, Saw 10, and The Exorcist. Beyond that, the rest of the year has Dune Part 2, The Killer, Wonka, and The Color Purple.
Related:There’s No Need To Worry About Spider-Man 2 Skipping State Of Play
Movies come out and people go to see them. It’s the same with TV shows. Music albums tend to have shorter release cycles but that’s only so artists can ride the wave of a single up to the album drop. No one is as strangely protective of release dates as video games, nor do they rely on them for excitement. Games are more likely to be delayed than a movie, so I understand some of the secrecy, but most of the time it’s just artificial marketing.
When Todd revealedSpider-Man 2would be out in “looks like September” it wasn’t a surprise. We knowInsomniacis good with deadlines and this wasPS5’sbig pre-Christmas game. It might slip back a couple of weeks to avoidStarfield, but the date is pencilled in. Yet Todd was forced to delete the tweet and even apologised (albeit jokingly), but it only serves to highlight how silly games are. We all know Spider-Man 2 is launching at the back end of this year and Todd didn’t even reveal a date. After an accomplished career in film spanning five decades, it’s natural that Todd would think nothing of saying ‘this thing you know I’m in that you know is almost finished is out in about six months’. It’s weird that we think it’s weird.
A similar thing happened when Starfield revealed its release date in a YouTube video dropped with no warning. ‘I can’t believe this is how they revealed the release date!’ came the cry, but not everything in games needs Geoff Keighley standing in front of it screaming ‘World Premiere!’. Likewise, people couldn’t believeFromSoftwarejust tweeted it out thatElden Ringwas getting DLC, but that’s the easiest, most efficient, and in any other industry, most normal way to deliver that information.
I love games, but the way we talk about them is exhausting at times. It’s worse for developers who are wrapped up in NDAs and may spend years of their career on a product that gets scrapped but keeps the NDA intact, leaving them with an unexplainable hole in their resume. It’s hard to imagine a grip being unable to say they worked on a Netflix romcom that had funding pulled, or an actor being told off for saying their already-announced movie should be in theatres around September.
I’m sure Tony Todd is going to be a great Venom, and it’s always special when an actor actively engages with fans and shows excitement for a project. He’s not being wheeled out on stage at some event to promote the game due to contractual obligations, he’s just chatting on Twitter because he loves what he does. It’s disappointing that gaming’s weird rules and studio mandates stop actors from doing that lest they reveal the game we know is scheduled for late Q3 2023 will arrive around September.
