Release date not official, So-o-o

Explore Lulukoko, Tsukuyusa, and Westown in this multi-cultural farming game for Nintendo 3DS. [ Game Guide ] JP release = Jun 2016. NA release = Feb 2017. EU release = Oct 2017.
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HM Grammy
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I've tried pre-ordering before the official release date, gotten hopes up, gotten burned and vowed never to pre-order without an official release date again. Then the next time I didn't pre-order and the pre-order date became the release date . . . argh! So for those who are much better informed about these things than I am, if they are going to change the unofficial release date how close do they come to the original unofficial date before they change it? Does that make sense? I don't know how else to put it. So original unofficial date is last day of February, will it change when we hit February or will they wait until a week before, if they have not given an official release date yet. Just asking about what tends to happen, I will not hunt anyone down if you are not spot on. I am merely trying to keep hope alive after they which shall not be named did not do that which they said they would and have totally bummed me out.
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Arcy
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When I've noticed this with games that have a placeholder date rather than a release date, the retailers usually change it anywhere from 14 days (two weeks) before the placeholder date to the day of/day after the placeholder date. It depends on several factors including popularity of the title and good communication from the publisher. The more popular something is, the more preorders and angry customers there will be. The better the communication with the publisher, the more knowledge the retailer will have on when to expect a shipment or what stage the game is in on the process to being in their store.

I say, don't sweat it. Preorder whenever you have the money, make sure you earmark that payment so you won't be surprised by a future withdrawal. In the meantime, treat all placeholder dates like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. Nice thoughts, but imaginary. Only mark on your calendar what the publisher (in this case XSEED) says.

Hatsuu from XSEED used to have a good post about this (Placeholder dates, why they exist, and why they are often pushed back) on her Tumblr, but sadly it seems to have vanished from the internet. :(
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Arcy wrote: Hatsuu from XSEED used to have a good post about this (Placeholder dates, why they exist, and why they are often pushed back) on her Tumblr, but sadly it seems to have vanished from the internet. :(
Huh, that sucks. Didn't know she got rid of her tumblr and all the fantastic pieces wrote on localization.

I did find that post (I think it was this one?) posted on reddit from a few years ago:
"I’ve noticed a lot of people being frustrated when games don’t come out as soon as they’d like, so I’d like to share why those games seem to take forever, as well as pointers. This doesn’t just apply to my company, but to many companies, even! It’ll be fairly helpful.

Placeholder dates: See those dates on Amazon or Gamestop? Don’t go by them. If a game was just announced and is coming up for pre-order, those dates aren’t real dates yet. Those are oftentimes placeholder dates, or ‘goal dates’, made by publishers. Ideally, they’d love to make those dates! But it’s not a ship date, and certainly not a release date. Look for official press releases, on a publisher’s facebook, twitter, or mailing list, to see what they say about dates.

Good Terms to know
:

Placeholder date: Like said above, an imaginary date made by developers or publishers as a goal date, but also so people can take pre-orders. Many places require a date in order for pre-orders to be taken, thus, the birth of this. It’s commonly seen as something like ‘December 31st, 2014’ or something way off in the future, but that’s not always the case.

Release date: If a publisher releases a statement and says, “December 25th is the release date," it’s expected to be in stores December 25th.
Ship date: If a publisher releases a statement and says, “December 25th is the ship date," it’s expected that the title, which is stored in warehouses and ready for pick-up for various places like Best Buy, Amazon, Gamestop, etc., could possibly be in stores December 25th, but it’s only beginning to be picked up from said warehouses on the 25th, and it’s expected that those places will have them in stock throughout the week.

Developer: The people who made the game. Say you’re a writer, and you wrote a book. You’re the developer, in this case. A team made a concept and programmed it into life. The developers for Rune Factory 4, for example, are Neverland.

Publisher: The people who distribute the game. You wrote this book, but you have no means of making it into physical copies and distributing it to the masses. You go to a publisher who will fund this venture. In the case of video games, publishers will translate it into another language, edit the work, and then distribute. Beyond that, they don’t make the games, they just try to make them available. XSEED Games would be the publisher in North America for Rune Factory 4.

Localizer: Sometimes a company can’t publish in certain regions, but they translated, localized, and edited the game. So, they’ll do all that work, but they’ll give the publishing rights to someone else. XSEED Games was both the localizer and publisher for the North American version of Way of the Samurai 4. However, NISA used our English version and published it in Europe, since they have the ability to do so while we can’t.

Why would publishers do this? Ship dates? Why not do release dates always? It’s confusing!
Actually, ship dates used to be the standard. With the rise of the big-budget AAA titles, release dates became increasingly common, but smaller publishers can’t work with those kinds of schedules, since any small set-back and take a lot of time to fix.

But even a long time ago, a place said December 25th, and I could go in and pick up my copy on December 25th.

Sometimes, it works that way! Sometimes things within publishing don’t go wrong, production and manufacturing move swiftly, and places like Gamestop and Amazon can pick the games up sooner than expected with a ship date, allowing them to stock it sooner.
*Well, why can’t it always work that way? *

It’s no understatement to say the process of every single game is different. One title can go smooth as butter, the next can be a rocky road of hell, and there’s not much anyone can do about it. If a publisher has a lot of employees, if places you communicate with (like Sony, or maybe the developers in Japan) respond to approvals quickly, if manufacturing works out, things might not be so bad. But if you’re small, if people don’t respond to e-mails, if your product fails inspection (which I’ll explain later), things get pushed back before you even realize it.
Full link: https://www.reddit.com/r/JRPG/comments/ ... o/cb4gdti/
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Thank you so much to both of you!
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Arcy
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RopeMaidenKirie wrote:Huh, that sucks. Didn't know she got rid of her tumblr and all the fantastic pieces wrote on localization.

I did find that post (I think it was this one?) posted on reddit from a few years ago:
-snipped-
Full link: https://www.reddit.com/r/JRPG/comments/ ... o/cb4gdti/
That's the one! Thanks so much for finding an archived version of it! I'm surprised and saddened her Tumblr is gone, it gave me (and many others) a lot of helpful insight into the localization and publishing process, at least for a company around that size that does a lot of in-house and collaboration work. In addition to that, the link to the Tumblr page is still in her Twitter profile's header, so I really wonder what happened there, but I no longer have a personal Twitter account, so I can't ask or anything.
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There's something re: release date that I'm a bit confused on.

I've mostly seen it taken as gospel that Trio will be released in EARLY 2017.

However...I've not been able to find anything about XSEED actually saying anything other than simply '2017'. Why is it that people think it's going to come out in the first quarter/spring? Did XSEED say so and I've just missed it? I'd always figured the game wouldn't be out before mid 2017 so if the company really does think they'll be releasing early in the year, that'd be nice news for me. I just can't find any confirmation of it.

EDIT: Mind you, if BotW and Trio come out close together, I'm going to have one huge first-world problem on my hands...
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Arcy
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Kikki wrote:There's something re: release date that I'm a bit confused on.

I've mostly seen it taken as gospel that Trio will be released in EARLY 2017.

However...I've not been able to find anything about XSEED actually saying anything other than simply '2017'. Why is it that people think it's going to come out in the first quarter/spring? Did XSEED say so and I've just missed it? I'd always figured the game wouldn't be out before mid 2017 so if the company really does think they'll be releasing early in the year, that'd be nice news for me. I just can't find any confirmation of it.

EDIT: Mind you, if BotW and Trio come out close together, I'm going to have one huge first-world problem on my hands...
From XSEED themselves, I've also only seen the date given as "2017", without a more specific timeframe added. Honestly, given the large amount of text and the free major updates the game has been given, I thought it would take at least 12 months to localize and publish.

I thought it might have come from E3, but I can't find a date on any of the materials officially given out by XSEED at that time either. The official trailer doesn't have a date on it at all.

My guess is that the placeholder date is at fault for the widespread belief that this game will be out early this year, in conjunction with the last two games taking only 9-13 months to localize for the NA region.

Here's my opinion and guesses: 10 months would put it at mid/end of March (same release window as Story of Seasons, and around where I was mentally placing the earliest possible launch, and that only IF Marvelous had given XSEED advance scripts - at least 2 months in advance in this case), but 12 would put it in mid/end of June, which is also a possibility if they're not looking to patch the game in other regions at all, because then they would need to localize AND put all the most recent Japanese updates on the cart. They just recently had a very substantial content update relese and patch release back-to-back.

And remember, even at 13 months for Story of Seasons, there were still crashes and (no translation) dialogue bubbles and some bits of dialogue that just weren't translated at all, and weird personality shifts and inconsistencies in character dialogue, and many mistakes in item description texts and flavor texts. I'd rather wait another six months than have all that happen again, as both a consumer and fan of the series!

Even Wikipedia has "Q1 2017" listed as a release date somehow!

ETA: my bad, A New Beginning took 9 months, but Story of Seasons took 13. Granted, part of that was adding in a major content patch to the NA release version as well (Seedling Mode).
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Okay, so I'm not crazy. Thanks, Arcy.

I searched as much as I could to find a confirmed 'Q1/Spring 2017' release date offered by XSEED, but the only thing I found was one from a Siliconera article. But I don't know where they got their info from. If you go to the Xseed Story of Seasons Facebook page, the header shows only '2017' as the release window.

I also remembered that SoS1 took 13 months and that this game was even more work to localize and so should take at least as long. I know they got it before the Japanese release (no idea how much before, though) but I still figured we wouldn't see it out in North America before Summer 2017, so that everyone and everything I look up is saying that it'll be out Spring/Q1 was really confusing me.

If anyone finds confirmation of XSEED themselves saying this, I'd love a link to the article/site/etc.
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Kikki wrote:I still figured we wouldn't see it out in North America before Summer 2017, so that everyone and everything I look up is saying that it'll be out Spring/Q1 was really confusing me.

If anyone finds confirmation of XSEED themselves saying this, I'd love a link to the article/site/etc.
Spring 2017 is a possibility, as Spring 2017 runs from March 20th to June 20th, but since there's no official date, who knows? In my own mind, Summer is more likely at this point. I'm the kind of person who prepares for the worst but hopes for the best. ;)

I think in video game terms that Q1 is January, February, and March, though. The fiscal year for 2017 started last October, so it can't be that. Unless they mean retail fiscal year?

I'd also be very interested seeing a quote from XSEED, as everyone who is insisting the Amazon placeholder date is the release date refuses to listen to anything resembling logic or reason.
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Amazon isn't the only one with Feb 28 so I think that might be part of the problem. Ebgames also has that date so I think people are just being hopeful as the game is so anticipated. For me, doubly so after losing interest in Skytree so fast.
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This game is also a 20th anniversary game, and the first game did not get localized till summer 1997, no? It helps me to look at it that way; that it'd be more fitting if it came in the summer (along with the fact that they'd have more time to get it right!) because it is pretty unlikely that it'll come before end of March. And that's a pipe dream.
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Considering we're nearing the end of January and we still only have 2 localization blogs, to me, that's a heavy indicator that we'll probably be waiting far into the summer for this game. I think the first SOS had 10 localization blogs by comparison. Not a hard and fast rule, but interesting none the less.
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X-Post

Whelp, XSEED just posted this on their Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/XSEEDStoryOfSe ... 3386616854

Very strong hint that we're going to get a release date soon.

I have no idea what this means in terms of how rushed the game might be (this could be a bad thing), or it could mean that we're only getting the base game at this time with none of the updates or patches Japan got. Or it could just mean they've got the plushies ready to go.

XSEED is such a tease.
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Huh, the game may be out sooner than I thought then. It always seems like Xseed never announces release dates until we're really close to them.
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If they really WERE to release on February 28th, that announcement might squash a squeal right out of me. ANY time in Q1 would REALLY be above my expectations and be, you know...delightful.

Except...except...

Breath of the Wild comes out only 3 days after that! (!!!) I mentioned it before, but that would be one meltdown of a first-world problem, for me. How on earth would I divide my time between the two? The stress of the decision might require medication...I'm getting the too-much-awesome-gaming-at-once jitters just thinking about the possibility.

Well, for everyone on this forum who doesn't give a hoot about BotW (and there must be some of those) then it's probably an unmitigated thrill to think Trio could be out so soon. But to be level-headed about it...is there anything else that that post could have meant? It was what I thought when I saw it on Twitter this morn, too, but...

EDIT: Okay, I couldn't take the pressure any more. Caved and pre-ordered, and am just hoping that Amazon.ca doesn't have the Capybara plush included as a bonus because to me it is very ugly and totally un-cute, and I don't want to deplete the supply of a toy everyone else really wants when I couldn't even appreciate it if I got it.
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