Activision Publishing, Inc. knows that the year is about to come to an end, and there are still tons of other great games coming your way in the near future but for the moment, they would like to concentrate on Blur, the company’s highly anticipated foray into the racing genre. Scheduled to ship sometime next year from the original 2009 release date, the delay is meant to offer the development team more time to enhance the game’s innovative and distinctive online multiplayer gameplay so that you won’t end up with a gimped product right out of the box.

According to Mike Griffith, President and CEO, Activision Publishing, “We are committed to making Blur a great new racing franchise, and we are very encouraged by the game’s design. The additional time will allow the studio to fully optimize the vision they set out to create for Blur including a distinctive and groundbreaking multiplayer mode that will appeal to a broad audience.”

What do you think of game development timelines? Is it better to release a title at the advertised date in order to keep gamers happy, while releasing patches down the road in order to fix up all that is wrong slowly but surely? After all, the disadvantage of delaying a game’s release just to catch up with hardware innovations of the time might eventually leave the game’s release suspended – take a good look at Duke Nukem Forever which is forever doomed to be an infamous piece of vapor ware. Hopefully Activision will do gamers right by taking the additional time required to make sure the final product is as polished as possible without the need for any pesky patches or updates in the future.

Press Release

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