The Fall 2014 Video Game Delay Curse Claims Another Victim

Hey, remember when there were going to be all these awesome games this fall? Yeah, us too. And the cupboard just got a little emptier.

This week’s victim? Evolve, the multiplayer shooter from Turtle Rock that’s been in the works for years now. According to Kotaku, it’s the usual routine about time:

“We primarily decided that the title deserves and should have more time to be polished so it can reach its absolute optimal state before we release it,” Take-Two boss Strauss Zelnick said on a conference call this afternoon. “Historically, we’ve always benefitted from giving the creative teams more time to polish their titles. We’ve never regretted it.”

Evolve moves off an October release date and into February, which is a little less crowded, but will probably fill up quickly considering all the delays. That doesn’t mean that October isn’t still a massive pile-up of games: To give you an idea of just how jammed the schedule is, there are more than twenty games hitting shelves in October right now, even with all the delays, while November will see sixteen and so far, for December, there’s a grand total of two titles hitting shelves. This is one of many reasons I rickroll Birch with the whiniest ’90s rock ballad at every opportunity: The Five Games cupboard is going to be pretty barren for a while.

The question really becomes who gets the axe next at this point, because it seems every two weeks another game flees October like it’s a haunted graveyard. I remain surprised Ubisoft hasn’t turfed Assassin’s Creed: Unity into next year yet, even though as an enormously technically complex game it seems an obvious candidate.

At this rate, October might just be manageable. Now watch as every game crowds into February.

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