If you're heavy into any merchandising industry, you're probably familiar with the day of the week that it releases new products. Whether it's DVDs and video games on tuesdays or comics on wednesdays or even new movies in the theatres on fridays (with the occassional wednesday release and the high profile thursday release), if you're into it you know what day to check for new releases. This is also true now in the digital download world as well. Everyone who's a virtual console fan knows that Mondays are the day to check in! Rock Band has made tuesdays a lot like Christmas (for both good and bad reasons) with its releases. And everyone knows that Wednesdays are for Xbox Live Arcade and Thursdays for Playstation Network/Store. The problem is when release dates get staggered by higher and higher demand for products and shipping delays, that now you don't purchase games off the shelf like you used to in the Nintendo days, you pre-purchase and nearly own the game weeks or even months before it drops.

So what's the big deal with release dates, anyway? Are they more important now because they're scheduled and maintained better? Is demand now just much higher and therefore we care more? I remember back in the days of both the NES and Sega Genesis/SNES, I would see an ad in a gaming mag, want the game, and go to the store and find it there. Nowadays is this happens, you probably find out that you can't find your game because it's sold out. What if you didn't know that Halo 3 was coming out on Tuesday. What if you had to wait for your friday paycheck to purchase Rock Band. Tough, you've missed your chance. it's gotten so bad that at any given time I could have 2-8 games reserved as early as six months in advance. A lot of people say that reservations aren't worth it, but honestly the amount of games printed can often be like the stock market, you never know what's going to happen. I remember the day that Bioshock came out and seeing the store shelves empty. I was worried about getting jumped in the parking lot the day I brought home my Rock Band bundle for the 360 on release day. I even remember getting offered $100 for my brand new sealed copy of Assassin's Creed on the 360. It's crazy! I also remember pre-ordering Halo 3 and COD4, only to see better deals and tons of copies in every major retailer. I got nothing extra for my copy of COD4 from Gamestop, but had I bought it at Circuit City I'd have gotten COD3 and a poster of all the multiplayer maps for FREE! Like I said, it's all a gamble.

And on that note, what is it with playing a game early? On eBay I saw a copy of Halo 3 for sale a week before it was released for over $600. $600! For a week?!? Really?!? Is it really that imperative? And the worst part is the guy who bought it beat it in about 10 hours and turned and complained for the rest of that week that it wasn't worth the money. I know someone who paid $200 to have Army of Two a week early. Hell, if you monitor the forums on Xbox.com, you can see people with 1,000 achievement points for a game not 2 days after it comes out (for many it's only a few hours after release). I knew guys that went to the Monday night launch parties for Halo 3 and had 800 or more achievement points by morning. Isn't this all just burning games out too quickly? Do you feel better that you got it before everyone else? And now that many games have an online multiplayer element, these games aren't much fun to play unless everyone's got the game so that you can have some competition.

I was listening to a gaming podcast the other day and the girl (I'm keeping this anonymous on purpose) on there was complaining about the fact that Gran Tourismo 5 Prologue was on store shelves on Wednesday but that it didn't hit the PS Store until Thursday. She thought it was stupid because a digital download requires a lot less planning and distribution and should have been available, at least, at the same time as the tangible disc. The other two male hosts responded to her by saying, "But everyone knows that the PS Store releases new content on Thursday." She tried to protest this case, but they were stern with simply restating exactly what I was thinking, which is that PS Store updates on Thursday. If Rock Band sold their new songs in disc form and they reached a store shelf on Monday, I would still expect that the download wouldn't be available until Tuesday. This is what I find compelling, it's a big deal when you have to go out to the store and pick up a game at midnight, but we're totally cool with waiting an extra day for the download service to update. Maybe going purely digital downloads would be better, if for no other reason than to make life more consistent and so that we never have to worry about anything selling out.