Last night Peter Moore announced at the EA Sports Season Opener event that
Madden NFL 12 would be
releasing on August 30 rather than August 13. This announcement seemed peculiar given the fact that the game has always released on August 13. It also only fueled speculation because there are the potential issues with an extended NFL lockout and key Tiburon developers leaving the
Madden team in the
middle of the development of this year's game.
However, after speaking with EA Sports
PR representative Rob Semsey, it seems like more a case of bad timing than anything else. The release date will actually continue to be August 30 beyond just this year. The thought process behind the move seems to be to sync
Madden up with the start of the real NFL regular season.
Obviously, other potential factors like giving
NCAA Football a bit more space to collect sales before
Madden releases should be taken into consideration, but the overall sense was this was not a decision that was made overnight, but rather one that the team had wanted to make for quite some time.
From my perspective, this makes a lot of sense considering Peter Moore went out of his way last night to point out that he thought the
improved sales of
Tiger 12 could at least be partially attributed to how close the real Masters was to when
Tiger 12 released. Tapping into the excitement of the upcoming real sports season seems to be something EA really wants to focus on across all its sports brands moving forward, so it would not shock me to see other release dates slightly tweaked in the future.