Jayson Young: Games should be released several weeks before the real season starts. Fans are excited to learn about all the new faces in each year's game, as well as scout out their favorite team's upcoming schedule. Plus, the reality is that most games these days ship with one or two major problems. In other words, the extra window between a game's release and the sport's opening day gives developers more time to get their game working properly so fans are not stuck with a broken game when the real season starts.


Dustin Toms: Games need to come out before the season starts. That's all there is to it. Many gamers use the Maddens and The Shows of the world to get themselves pumped up for the season to start. I also know that without sports games my knowledge of rosters would be nowhere near as impressive as it is now.

One final point that I would like to make is based on rosters. Every year Knight and the OS community get MLB: The Show and start creating every team's farm club. They work long hours for free just so they, and all the other baseball fans out there, can play with all of the young talent on each squad's roster. The best part about it is that each year the goal is to get the rosters finished by the time the real season starts, and the past few years the roster file has been released within a week of the MLB's first game. But if The Show were to come out two days prior to the first pitch, everyone would be waiting a lot longer to get the rosters they love.


Caley Roark: I would rather get a polished game near opening day instead of a buggy one a month in advance. The truth is for a lot of games, the rosters that ship are inaccurate anyway. I'm always itching to start my Show franchise, but I need to wait for the actual teams to name starters and their 25-man rosters.


Kelvin Mak: My heart says the earlier the better, but rationally, I prefer the games to release closer to the season's start. Sure, watching all the promo videos and playing a demo for weeks does not scratch the itch, but every time after I unwrap the game like a kid on Christmas morning, I realize that two things tend to happen:

1. There are usually a few bugs that need to be eliminated, and releasing a game earlier than the companies do now is probably just going to make that worse.

2. Since I mostly stick to single-player modes, even if I start a franchise as soon as I get the game, I almost always start another one a few days after the real season has begun -- or for soccer games, after the transfer window has closed. So a game being released earlier does not stand to benefit me much because the heavy gaming won't begin yet either way.


Bob Kollars: I want the game to ship at least a month before the real season begins. As a franchise/dynasty guy, I need time to get acclimated to the gameplay and tweak sliders. In the case of NCAA Football this year, it will probably take us two weeks to find the right blend of sliders, wait for rosters and do roster tweaks. For people who are pumped about the seasonal sport that they love, these yearly sports title can't come quick enough. As mentioned previously, let's say you're an NFL and Madden fan. You do not need to have the start of the season and the game's release coincide with each other -- for some, these two events syncing up might cause some to be hospitalized for overexcitement.

...Oh, did I mention I am also just very impatient.


Christian McLeod: Call me old fashioned, but I actually miss the days when Madden would release in October, and other sports franchises hit after the season started, too. For some reason, those games seemed so much more complete compared to today's crop. You rarely had game-breaking bugs, patches did not exist, and the final product was extremely polished. I know that part of the reason for these late releases was because there was no way of integrating roster updates, but I just remember investing so much more time with those titles.

I'll even freely admit that I'm the type of gamer who finds himself shelving several big sports titles like EA's NHL title after about a week, only to start playing again in November/December when the real NHL action starts heating up. Perhaps this is the root cause for my enjoyment of the games mentioned above, and this translates to a perceived lack of quality in my head. Either way, I don't care what anyone says, there is no reason why Madden should ever be released in mid-August, or why we should be playing a hockey game before training camp breaks. The developers should polish the game and enjoy the natural hype the beginning of each sports season generates.



Well, it looks like we'll have to leave it up to the community to break the tie.