Phantom Blade 0’s director has stated that there are no plans to shift its release date further away from Grand Theft Auto 6, even though other publishers are running scared. A glance at the autumn release schedules reveals just how terrified many video game publishers are by the November launch of GTA 6. They are all keeping well out of its way, but that has created a huge traffic jam of new releases in September and October, in which many are bound to suffer.
However, some publishers are not 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 targets a very different audience than the GTA 6 crowd. S-Game, the Chinese developer behind Phantom Blade 0, is similarly unfazed. In an interview, the studio explained that nothing about GTA 6 has impacted its development or release timing.
Phantom Blade 0 launches on October 29, just three weeks before GTA 6, making it the closest any big-budget game gets to Rockstar’s title. Three weeks may still seem relatively long, but by that point Take-Two will have begun its 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 is not even thinking about that and is more concerned with ensuring Phantom Blade 0 is actually a good game.
‘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 ongoing memory shortages, which are 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 is even less of a direct competitor. The game is still keenly anticipated in the West, though. While it could easily be mistaken for just another Soulslike, it is more a traditional action role-playing game, not dissimilar to Devil May Cry.
