This fall started out seeming like it was going to be jam-packed with games. But the pack has steadily been winnowed. Driveclub, The Order: 1886, Mad Max, Dying Light, The Witcher 3 and Quantum Break have all bailed to next year, but this next one, Batman: Arkham Knight, is gonna hurt.
Confirmed by Kotaku, Batman: Arkham Knight is slipping to 2015. A specific date hasn’t been announced, possibly because it wants to muscle in some room to be the only game on your plate at a specific time next year.
The results are two-fold. One, it puts another vast, sucking hole in the release schedule for the year. The back half of the year is already looking surprisingly empty for a year where new consoles have been on the market for a while and dev teams have supposedly been grinding away for Christmas. Other than annual franchises like Madden and Call of Duty, this looks more like, well, this summer. That will hopefully be improved somewhat after E3; a whole bunch of announcements are coming and at least a handful of games for fall will be announced.
Two, Sony and Microsoft are probably furious right now. Batman: Arkham Knight is a major franchise and one of the first to go exclusively next-gen. If you want the pay-off to two games’ worth of plot development, you’re buying a PS4 or Xbox One to get it. The lack of that to push people towards new consoles is surely going to cost both Sony and Microsoft a few console sales, although to be fair neither of them are suffering in that regard.
Either way, expect some strategies to shift and games to suddenly see a lot more marketing. Somebody’s got to fill the hole, after all, and even if we can’t have Batman, he’ll surely be in our hearts.
Batman: Arkham Knight‘s PR team also sent over the first footage of the game’s Batmobile: