Black Ops 3 will launch on ?

Black Ops 3—will launch on November 6th

The next Call of Duty video game—Black Ops 3—will launch on November 6th, Activision has confirmed—a Friday.

Friday is an unusual day for a Call of Duty release. Traditionally, most video games, including the Black Ops games, have released on Tuesdays in North America.

“We thought  it would be really fun for the fans to kick-off Black Ops 3 on a weekend,” Rob Kostich, Senior Vice President at Activision Publishing told me, explaining the change. “The Black Ops series is the most played in Call of Duty history with nearly 100 million players to date. With Black Ops 3, the team at Treyarch is really taking things to a new level. There’s so much in this game across every mode of play. Campaign has been reimagined and can now be played cooperatively with your friends. Zombies, of course, are back. And multiplayer is bringing a ton of depth and new ideas to the experience. So giving fans as much time as possible out of the gate to experience all the game has to offer just made a lot of sense.”

In other words, getting the game out on a Friday let’s players who might have work or school constraints throughout the week, really dive into the game over the weekend. When you think about it, that makes a lot of sense. So why does Activision usually launch games on a Tuesday? For that matter, why does the industry so often release games in the middle of the week instead of when most players can jump in and start playing on a Friday?

“Traditionally, here in the States, Tuesday has been a date that has worked really well for our retail partners,” says Kostich. Tuesday is also the day of the week that CDs and DVDs typically hit retail, a somewhat antiquated brick-and-mortar tradition.
Of course, video games can trace their Tuesday release roots to Sega’s release of Sonic 2 on the Sega Genesis. That game was the first major global launch of a video game, and Sega’s marketing team called the release “Sonic 2sday” according to the book “Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle That Defined a Generation” by Blake Harris. That was on November 24th, 1992—23 years before the launch of Black Ops 3.

Will this mark a new trend of Friday release dates at Activision? Kotisch can’t say for sure. “As a company, we have released on different dates in the past. It really depends on the game and what works best for it. Again, for Black Ops 3, a Friday release to kick-off a weekend celebration was just something we thought our fans would really enjoy.”
There’s also a bit of a marketing pun in the Black Ops 3 Friday release.

Sonic got Sonic 2sday; Black Ops 3  gets its own Black Ops Friday, a not-so-subtle nod to the craziest shopping day of the year.

Cr.Forbes