Maybe release a game in May sometimes? 'Fixation on the holiday window' is hurting game publishers, says industry analyst Newzoo

The arrival of Hollow Knight: Silksong and Borderlands 4 marks the end of this year's summer doldrums, a period from around April through the end of August when the rate of big-budget and highly-anticipated mainstream game releases is at its lowest.

Lots of great games still release during this period, but the kinds of games that top Steam's wishlist chart tend to cluster at the start or end of the year, especially in February and October.

This is a mistake, according to videogame market intelligence company Newzoo. In the free edition of the firm's 2025 Global Games Market Report, available today, Newzoo says that game publishers are causing "avoidable cannibalization" by competing for attention and money at the same time of year.

To come to its conclusion, Newzoo looked at triple-A singleplayer games that came out on PC, PlayStation, and Xbox between 2021 and 2024, defining triple-A in this case as games that cost $51 and up.

February saw the most triple-A releases with 22, with October coming in just behind it with 21. The fewest $51+ games released in April, May, and July, with just seven in each of those months over the four-year span being studied.

The dark months of winter (at least in the Northern Hemisphere) seem like a sensible time to sell something you do indoors, and the holidays are the biggest consumer spending season, but Newzoo says that the industry's "long-standing fixation on the holiday window" is counterproductive.

Using player counts from their first three months, the firm compared how well games released in each month fared. At a glance, February and August do appear to have some magic—the average player counts shoot way up in those months—but that's because of extraordinarily popular outliers Hogwarts Legacy, Elden Ring, and Baldur's Gate 3. Drop those games from the data, and those months look more like the rest of the year, says Newzoo.

(Image credit: Newzoo)

The holiday months are also "more crowded than they appear," the firm says, because most of the August games release near the end of August, and most of the November games release in the first half of November.

Meanwhile, big games released in April and May are seeing results that aren't all that different from those more crowded months. For how busy a release month it is, September fares especially poorly in the dataset. That's possibly because everyone was still playing Baldur's Gate 3 in September 2023, to Starfield's dismay. Perhaps it would've done better had it released in May?

"Aug-Nov releases performed 34% worse, on average, compared to February-May," wrote Newzoo. "Even when excluding smash hits like Elden Ring and Hogwarts Legacy from our analysis, late-year titles still underperform by 25%."

Because of this well-established release cycle, I tend to think of the year as having two phases: the big releases period from September (or late August) through February, and the previews and announcements period from March through August, when things like GDC, Summer Game Fest, and Gamescom happen. I certainly wouldn't mind a more even distribution, though, and perhaps enterprising publishers will start to take April and May more seriously.

Newzoo's free Global Games Market Report is available now on its website. According to the company, 2025 will see the global PC player base rise 3.1% year-on-year to 936 million players, driven in part by Steam adoption in China and Japan. Newzoo also says that Gen Alpha (defined as people born in 2010 or later) is "an increasing share of the player base, especially on PC."