Irrational Games founder Ken Levine isn't concerned with the busy month of October 2012. Despite a month packed with likely blockbuster titles, Levine is confident BioShock Infinite will stand out among the games for what it is.
"If it's a great game I think it will do great. If it's not a great game, it won't do great. It's pretty simple with BioShock," he said.
BioShock Infinite releases on October 16th, just days before Medal of Honor: Warfighter and about a week before Assassin's Creed III. Following that, we'll likely seen the release of Call of Duty and Halo 4 in November.
For most developers, it's probably not the most comfortable of release times. For Levine, it's just another month.
Speaking to Eurogamer, Levine explained, "It's hard to categorize BioShock for people in their heads. It has its own vibe. It's a strange and different game. In the same way Portal didn't compete directly with anything. So you don't worry so much about, oh my god, we're competing directly with this, what are we going to do?"
"Obviously, when you go into that time period you have a positive and negative. The negative is there are a lot of games competing for the dollar or pound of the gamer. Or the euro – I want to be inclusive here. But also there are a lot of people going into stores at that point, and a lot of people buying gifts. It's a yin and yang situation."
Levine likened the situation to Battlefield 3, which launched in similarly crowded October and November 2011.
"We don't have the problem that, say, a Battlefield had last year – and I don't think they viewed it as a problem, they viewed it as an opportunity – of going up in a head-to-head."
Of course, BioShock is completely different than Battlefield which openly targeted Activision's blockbuster shooter Modern Warfare 3. As we all know, Battlefield 3 failed to outsell MW3 which went on to smash sales records; but, BF3 didn't too bad either, selling over 10 million copies.
Irrational Games settled on the October release because it fit in with the studio's development cycle.
"I don't think there's a ton of science in our industry about these things at this point," Levine continued. "A lot of it is your gut. You hear, you have to release at Christmas. Others say, you can't release at Christmas. At the end of the day, the product is pretty unique and will sink or swim on its own merits."
