In terms of complexity, anxiety, and sheer turbidity, launching a videogame seems roughly equivalent to planning a land war on Mars. It's a constant, 5D chess game with thousands of players and no clear ruleset, where definite victories become humiliating defeats—and vice versa—according to no obvious ruleset. But at least one thing is clear: you're better off not launching your plucky little indie thing against GTA 6 or some other Vredefort-impact scale release.
So you can imagine a lot of devs' disappointment when Bethesda popped up last week to announce it was releasing Oblivion Remastered, suddenly dropping a humongous launch in the middle of what had been, previously, a relatively uncluttered release period.
"From the perspective of indies and indie publishers, this is the problem with these sort of massive shadow drops," said Raw Fury boss Jónas Antonsson (via GamesRadar) on X. "Everything more or [less] gets buried." Raw Fury is the publisher of puzzle-horror game Post Trauma, which released last week on, um, April 22. That's the same day Oblivion Remastered hit.
Antonsson says a whole lot of strategy goes into release timings, and something like Oblivion popping up can pretty much capsize everything. "We don’t have the cash nor muscle to throw around, so everything is carefully planned. Including when to release, based on other releases etc—to try to maximize the chances of getting attention.
"Love the game that dropped but feel the pain for our team," said Antonsson. Which, hey, seems fair to me. It's not just Raw Fury that was blindsided by Bethesda, either. Mike Rose—dev on strategy deckbuilder Starless Abyss—put out a call for publicity on X after the game released in "the exact week that Oblivion was shadow-dropped" and noted that the coincidence had been "not fantastic for our launch."
Hi Twitter, could really use your help 🙏🙏We just launched our latest game, Starless Abyss -- the exact week that Oblivion was shadow-dropped. Which has been *not fantastic* for our launchIf anyone can spare a RT, that would be so, so helpful ❤️❤️Here's the launch trailer: pic.twitter.com/vOB0VUEWSvApril 25, 2025
Even devs whose launches didn't happen alongside Bethesda's can't help but be affected when such a big fish makes a splash in the pond. "I'm pretty sure Oblivion releasing gave us like a 10-20% haircut on daily revenue" posted Caves of Qud's Brian Bucklew on Bluesky. "I noticed a complete stop in game sales from about 2 pm onward on Oblivion day," added Francisco González, dev on adventure game Rosewater.
This isn't the first time this kind of thing has happened, even in the last couple of months. In March, the (not surprise) release of Monster Hunter Wilds led devs to lament a lack of sales.
So I'm not really sure if this kind of thing can truly be solved. Sure, not surprise-dropping massive games would help, but even when you announce a release date for a huge game well in advance, devs will still end up outweighed. It's a rough one, although it's worth remembering that the Oblivion remaster was pretty much an open secret even before it dropped last week. So much so that Bethesda's refusal to just come out and finally announce the thing drove fans to the brink of madness, so it didn't come completely out of the blue. Still, I can't help but feel a bit sorry for the devs caught under Bethesda's forward march.
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