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Judging by the November release schedule, few publishers will dare release within spitting distance of GTA 6. Which is understandable, but it’s caused a massive bottleneck in October: Ace Combat 8, Gears of War: E-Day, Star Wars: Galactic Racer and Modern Warfare 4 will all release next month.
And that’s not including all the other anticipated games not under the wings of a major publisher. I’m talking about a new Hellraiser game, Silver Pines, Jonathan Blow’s next one, Planet Zoo 2, a remaster of Tales of Eternia, and the 1.0 launch of Enshrouded. There’s even a new Final Fantasy 2D-HD remake.
Joining this fray will be Valor Mortis, a new first-person soulsike (their words) by the creators of the Ghostrunner series. It looks better than the concept sounds: a recent demo was well-received, mostly because it seems to nail first-person melee combat, which is famously hard to get right.
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I wouldn’t dare predict how well or otherwise Valor Mortis will sell when it releases on October 13, but it certainly has its work cut out for it. Its publisher Lyrical Games is well aware of this, as CEO Blake Rochkind told The Game Business in a recent interview.
“By virtue of the development schedule, the cards we’ve been dealt is that we are one of the only new IPs launching this fall,” Rochkind said. “We are pretty confident in Valor Mortis. But ultimately, the worst thing we could do is not push our chips in and say, ‘We want this to be a game that you can pick up alongside these other great games.’”
That’s basically the approach Lyrical Games is taking: they’ve priced Valor Mortis at $40 so that people can play it and the pricier blockbuster fare releasing alongside. “A developer I spoke to recently had a lot of success with a game priced at $30, which would probably be $40 today. One thing they said that really stuck with me is: ‘We never regretted being an ‘and’ game. We never regretted pricing our game as something that you can pick up alongside other games.’ Going with this price point will help us be an ‘and’ game.”
This is probably common sense among publishers but it’s interesting to hear it presented so bluntly. Just as it was interesting to hear the creators of Peak rationalise its low price: “4 bucks is also kind of 5 bucks, 3 bucks is 2 bucks. And 2 bucks is basically free”.
It’s also interesting, albeit understandable, that a AA action game would prefer the company of four other blockbuster competitors rather than GTA 6. The only meaningful November competitor there is Nintendo’s Ocarina of Time remake, which is also something most wise publishers will want to give a wide berth to. Neither are releasing on PC.
