It's a common complaint from gamers when they look at release lists: there are just too many games to play during the holiday season. Wouldn't it be better if game releases were spread out throughout the year? Research firm EEDAR has taken the time and effort to crunch the numbers, and the data it dug up is interesting... and won't lead to many changes in the behavior of publishers.

"While the fourth quarter does have a significantly higher quantity of releases, so too does it have a significantly higher proportion of the year's sales," the report states. "The thoughts on releasing more games in Q4 seem to run analogous to expanding a sports stadium from holding 20,000 fans to 35,000 fans—if you can fill the seats, than the expansion is justified." Sales go up, more games can be supported, so why not release more games?

The next thing EEDAR looked at was the quality of releases spread across the year, and in fact they found that the quality of games remained consistent, for the most part, across all four quarters. If anything, you see more bad games coming out near the end of the year. In the area of "good" review scores, which is games that rate in the 70 to 84 range, there are fewer titles. You also see an increase of games in the "poor" section, which score 54 or below.

EEDAR's data shows that game quality is more or less constant throughout the year, judging by review scores

So if anything, the release schedule we're used to is working, although you can see a slight uptick in "shovelware" in the last quarter. More people are buying games, more games are being released, and you should be more cautious about what you buy during the holiday season. It's that last bit where you start to see the issue, though: for core gamers who buy games throughout the year, the holiday season becomes a nightmare of competing titles.

"Let us assume that a gamer owns all the next-generation systems and instead of calculating based on SKUs, where some games have multiple SKUs that score 85 or higher, we look at it on a per title basis... Quarters 1 through 3, on average, each produce 5 distinct games that score 85 or higher," the report claims. "Quarter 4 on average has 15, a 200 percent increase." While a wider range of consumers may be heading into the stores to buy games as gifts for husbands or wives or children and grandchildren, the consumer who gravitates towards high-quality game releases has a much harder time keeping up with games.

How bad is this issue for the discriminating gamer who buys games throughout the year? According to this report, if you only buy the highest quality games you could get by on a $250 quarterly gaming budget for the first three quarters, but you would need a $750 gaming budget to buy all the best games in the fourth quarter. That's insane, for even the most hardcore gamer.

The question of whether it would be better for publishers to space those high-quality games out is a complex one. The gaming market that buys games year round and waits on event titles is large, but it may not be as large as the built-in sales bump your product receives by launching in the fourth quarter. "Regardless of how you slice the data, games that score 85 or above in quality sell 15 to 20 percent more in their lifetime if released in the holiday than in the off-season," the report states. In other words, no matter how much hardcore gamers may complain, we might not be able to fight the power of Christmas.