So part of my job is actually helping inform on these types of questions to the corporations making the games so that they can pick the best release windows. Usually someone like me would have provided these answers to the executives since it's better to have somebody more specialized helping optimize your release windows rather than leaving it up to executives who have frequent blind spots to the immediate state of the market because they are usually zoomed too far out to really fine-tune these things. They have enough things to juggle already that they are likely to make mistakes if you ever let them near the fine details
I have an obvious answer I'd give here. Release Monster Hunter in the March window. A secondary, but also very profitable, release window for video games. It's around when people have money to spend again and when they have a reason to buy games again. It isn't as profitable as December is if you're that year's must buy, but it is less crowded and delaying until it saves you brand damage is important can be wiser than risking the crowded holidays. It also typically sees a rush in additional sales due to students of all ages having spring break and often wanting to pick up a new game to try and rush down in a single week. Since Monster Hunter makes post-sale money off of a combination of cosmetics and a large expansion a year or two later it is critical to maintain the reputation of the game as recently years have shown rough launches are unlikely to have future content sell even if the game was fixed after the fact. Due to the fanbase they can rely on decent sales no matter when they release so they are better off avoiding a crowded and competitive window like December for a safer, more open window.
I'd probably word it like this:
"The release window is still tentative. We're still likely to land in late Q1 2025 if any unforeseen delays become a possibility. Due to the importance of the Monster Hunter brand and our long term monetization strategy for both the brand and this specific entry we can't risk rushing this out and messing up. There's also the consideration that Monster Hunter has a loyal cult player base who will provide us a large base revenue regardless of our release window, but we still haven't achieved the wider mainstream appeal to compete with many of the competitors we'll be facing in the crowded December window. There is a secondary viable release window that is less crowded with reliable spending in time for March and the Spring Break purchases for those who will seek to complete the game in that week. This also allows us to avoid our other releases, which being remasters are vulnerable to being overshined by our own major release and that of our competitors, which risks us losing out on more valuable projected sales across those titles than we'd gain from the singular boost to Monster Hunter Wilds. These reasons have shown in our projections that it is better to wait in this situation."
I can guarantee you that somewhere at Capcom there is an executive who had this exact same thought and asked the exact same question of the person who was given the job of determining when to release the game when they decided to do so during the Q1 2025 window and they gave a very similar answer. They probably gave a more detailed answer than I did, because they have access to more information than I do. They probably have progress reports on the game, access to the most recent time estimates, models that were used to determine the likelihood of a potential delay, data concerning the marketing plan and how long that should take, not to mention that exact same data for everything else currently in the pipeline. Somewhere it is somebody's job to try and make sure that Capcom doesn't release anything too close to anything else that it would cannibalize their own market as well as avoiding certain forms of competition as well as strategically crushing key competition in the relevant genres from gaining momentum. Then there's the little detail that if Capcom considers Monster Hunter Wilds to be important enough there is someone who's only job is to make sure that they release it at the most profitable moment with the least risk. That person will be explaining and updating their decisions in real time to executives everyday so that they can ensure that course is followed. Those executives will turn around and just parrot the answers they got from their specialized consultant to the shareholders. That's how this works. The money people generally have the same questions. Professional money people usually have a lot more specific questions as a big part of their job is trying to guess what the other money people are going to ask when they go to those money people to ask for money, and so they ask the general questions and the specific questions both so they have those answers from the experts.
Honestly, as both a professional and a gamer, I would be ecstatic to know that an investor is taking enough interest in the company that they are asking these types of questions. That means they are liable to reinvest. They are trying to determine whether or not they want to commit more to the company and are actually aware of what the company's plan is as well as certain market factors. These are the types of questions you ask while you are making up your mind on if you want to really put money down on a company and you want to make sure that they know their stuff. If they heard an answer they liked and it turns out that Capcom were in the right with the answer they gave after release, there's a good chance that investor is about to dump money on Capcom and tell them to do it again. These are the types of investors who eventually actively push to ensure that the company doesn't start doing stupid things for short-term gain at the cost of the long-term. This isn't a guy who's looking for profit this quarter, because he's asking about future plans. He's looking at his long-term investment. He wasn't concerned so much about when he saw a return on his investment so much as how much that return was going to be. That's a very important distinction. That's the type of distinction that has you deciding to take a delay on your money today for a bigger return tomorrow. Those are the types of people who are unlikely to push towards damaging immediate monetization if it will cost the long-term. They are more likely to push companies towards higher quality products that continue to sell for the next 5 years. Especially because he was rightfully pointing out that 2024 is a really shitty looking year for Capcom. There's nothing to get excited for this year from them, so obviously he's concerned about their long-term plans as much as their immediate plans.
I will be the first person to bitch about suits because I work with them fairly often. I'm usually the bridge from the suits on high to the creatives down low. I'm functionally paid to tell both sides what the other side is thinking and insult them both to their face in service of the other side so that everything runs better. Sometimes you need to tell the executive he's a money grubbing jew pinching pennies and leaving dollars, and sometimes you need to tell the creative that he needs to pull the stick out of his ass and shove his vision there in service of making a profitable game that people will actually want to play. I have often described myself as a professional asshole in service to the company's profitability, which company changes rapidly because someone like me is only useful if we are there and gone again so fast that we don't become too comfy. Even with my disdain due to familiarity, I know that most of the executives in any one of these companies are actually very good at their job and can execute on the information they have with impunity to run a successful business so long as they have the right information. Most of their bonuses are reliant on turning a profit, and those bonuses aren't actually that big unless they are having consistent repeated high profits so they are actually incentivized to do their job. The times you get worried and start looking to either side knowing they are about to salt the earth on their way out is when you notice that they have decided to give themselves a lot of very large one-off bonuses before committing to a lot of short-term ideas with massive immediate payoffs with very obvious long-term consequences that mean they will net out lower so that they can qualify for those bonuses and grab their money and get out, or if they start grabbing large amounts of stock before doing things that will pump the stock price up today, with no plan to keep it up tomorrow, so they can then turn around and sell it again. When the economy starts getting a little bit unsteady this becomes far more of an issue, and so we are seeing a lot of this right now.
For the most part though, the failure is with consultants. An executive is not a god, they are a man with access to a lot of information and the final say on how to execute on that information. This means that they are only as good as the information that they have and their ability to wield it. The consultants under them sometimes try to protect their position by telling the executives whatever they want to hear and they hope that they can find a new job before they get thrown out for having garbage information and running out of ways to justify why they're garbage is actually gold. They might even tell their superiors something they know is a bad idea, but that they are ideologically aligned with, and provide misleading information to make that idea look better than it is while hoping they can jump ship, once again, before they run out of bullshit to cover their ass with. Right now there is a disturbing number of these in the industry, but I am seeing signs of a slow purge. This abnormally high number of ideologs and sycophants are mostly getting in through HR blocking out everyone else, but I don't think it's going to stay that way for much longer.
Others take the mentality I do, shoot from the hip and do your job with integrity without caring how many bridges you need to burn to do it right. Call your boss a fucking retard when he's a fucking retard, show respect when he's asking vague bullshit questions lay the numbers down and ask what his actual questions are so you can point at which number reveals that answer. If you don't have an answer, tell him you will get it and then get it for him. If you have to give bad news, advise on a solution rather than hide the news behind platitudes in the name of protecting your ass. Give as honest as you can estimation of the risks of if they take your advice and explain to them where the margins for error in your information are. This makes it very hard to stay with any particular company for long, you're not exactly making friends or promising more than can be realistically be achieved, but you tend to get called back in once they are done being mad at you for being such a prick and telling them what they didn't want to hear because they know that your information is good. It's why people like me are typically short-term contractors who come and go from a company on a short-term basis often measured in weeks and months, and since we lack long-term security we need to work a lot harder than someone who bullshits all day. People like me often are only around for a month to answer a single question, and then we bow out before we overstay are welcome so that the personal grudges don't have time to build up. It takes pride in your work to do it right, be it advising a company on what the best course is, designing a game that will sell, or building a house. No job can be done without pride and be done right.
Right now there's too many sycophants who do not take pride in their work of providing accurate information to those making the decisions. Instead they are giving inaccurate information rather than have dignity. When people at my level fuck up, the people above us have to start cutting out the people below us. And as I'm typically a bridge between those upper and lower levels, I have a certain amount of indignation at either side being mistreated undeservedly, especially when people like Jim are not calling out the people who are actually to blame for people who do really good work and who I really wish weren't being laid off getting laid off. Upper management usually isn't the issue, it is middle management and consultants who are. Not to say I am not aware of some cases where upper management isn't an issue. I've seen the projections for how Activision was going that were being sent to Bobby, they were bleak yet he wasn't looking to correct the issue since it wasn't broken yet and was obsessed with doubling down on what people were burning out on while firing the consultants that warned him then got confused when they were right. There's also times when the people at the bottom getting laid off deserve it for being talentless hacks. Honestly, as someone at the middle consultant and management level, fuck consultants and middle management only slightly more than fuck the suits and fuck the entitled creatives at the bottom.
