Xbox’s head of marketing, Aaron Greenberg, has had his say on the simultaneous release of Rise of the Tomb Raider and Fallout 4 on November 10th.
In an interview with Kinda Funny Games, Greenberg said “The challenge is that you have to look at the production schedule. You want to make sure that you don’t rush the game so that it’s not done or of high quality. That is always the number one priority.”
“The challenge with Tomb Raider is, if you go a week later you’re against Star Wars Battlefront, if you go a week earlier you’ll be against Call of Duty Black Ops 3 and if you go two weeks earlier you’re against Halo. And then you go late and then you’re like “well, the consumer doesn’t have any money left to buy the game” so there wasn’t a better scenario for us except that was the week it was not going head to head against Call of Duty or Star Wars Battlefront. We felt like the Fallout audience… they are not direct competitors per se, but you are right, it’s two big, big titles launching at the same time, and we hope people will buy both.”
“Would you rather launch against Call of Duty, Star Wars or Fallout?”
Greenberg went on to say that release dates are picked without other games in mind. “We’re first party so we know our dates are, most teams pick their dates not knowing what else is going to be there. And once you know, then would you rather launch against Call of Duty, Star Wars or Fallout? So you just got to launch and stick with the date and feel confident that the game still stand up and we believe it will. It’s a fantastic title.”
