Phantom Blade 0’s director has said there are no plans to shift its release date further away from GTA 6, even though other publishers are running scared.
One look at the autumn release schedules shows just how terrified other video game publishers are by the release of GTA 6 in November. They’re all keeping well out of its way, but that’s created a huge traffic jam of new releases in September and October, in which many are going to suffer.
However, some publishers aren’t allowing themselves to be intimidated and clearly see the release of GTA 6 as a prime opportunity. Atari, for example, is launching a retro Barbie collection, which obviously targets a very different audience than the GTA 6 crowd.
S-Game, the Chinese developer behind Phantom Blade 0, is similarly unfazed, explaining in an interview that nothing about GTA 6 has impacted its development or release timing.
Phantom Blade 0 launches on October 29, which is just three weeks before GTA 6 and the closest any big budget game gets to Rockstar’s game. Three weeks may still seem a relatively long time but at that point Take-Two will have begun their big marketing push, which stands to overshadow Phantom Blade 0… and everything else.
When questioned about GTA 6’s potential impact by PC Gamer, game director Qiwei ‘Soulframe’ Liang insisted that the team isn’t even thinking about that and is more concerned with ensuring Phantom Blade 0 is actually a good game.
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‘Many people may think we have some marketing strategy to move it from the overcrowded September, and some are very worried that it’s closer to November,’ explained Liang.
‘We don’t think about any of this. We only think of the quality of the product itself. I don’t think competition can influence much the success of a work. Only the product itself matters.
‘We don’t even think of the competition, what’s launching ahead or after. What matters is how polished the game is, and if we have one or two extra months, we can fix more bugs, do more optimisations, so that we don’t need a huge day one patch.’
If anything, Liang is more concerned with the ongoing memory shortages, which in turn is making gaming hardware across the board more expensive: ‘This year the hardware price is going up, and people who want to replace their hardware may postpone their plan to upgrade their equipment, so we think we need to let the game be played by as many players as possible without reducing the quality.’
S-Game’s lack of concern about GTA 6 could be due to the fact that the majority of its sales are likely to come from China. The Chinese home market is dominated by the PC but GTA 6 is only launching for consoles, which may have convinced S-Game that it’s even less of a direct competitor.
The game is still keenly anticipated in the West though, as while it could easily be mistaken for just another Soulslike, it’s more a traditional action role-playing game, not dissimilar to Devil May Cry.
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