Judging the Anthem launch window

I don't get it why it's a bad news.

Meh of course there will be issue, it's a brand new online game

Anno is about to lainch? That might be serious contender in my case. Despite being Ubishit hand botching last two iterations of the granchise.

Sure, and it's a fair point.

The devs have built up good communication and transparency so far,
so outside of general animosity to EA, I think the goodwill to BioWare is generally positive at this point.

I hope that will allow any problems to also be taken in players' stride.

Yup at beginning of February if I remember correctly and only for those who preorder

Well there is NOTHING of interest in the first three months of 2019 for me game wise. Guess my wallet can breath easy

No not even Anthem.

Because the trial is only on two platforms and it's not good to leave the biggest platform without a set-in-stone date to when they are going to get it?

Well, I think the launch window is favorable in terms of not having a lot of head-on competition for wallets. There is Exodus, which looks pretty good, but I don't think it is the kind of game that will pull everyone away, like RDR2 or whatever.

I do think that SofaJockey makes a valid point in that the dry launch window also makes for extreme visibility on Anthem. Not only with the main launch, but also with the "trial". If there is another Andromeda fiasco with disappointing animations and a multitude of glitches, it will reflect poorly on Bioware and diminish Anthem's potential. Even Fallout 76, a Bethesda game that would normally get a free-pass on bugs and glitches, is being harped on for these issues since people weren't entirely sold on the multiplayer-only Fallout game to begin with. The same can be said of Anthem and the fact that many vocal traditional Bioware fans have expressed disinterest in this "Destiny-style" game, saying that it helped kill Mass Effect and "Where's DA4?"

Anthem needs to hit it out of the park on day one, which is difficult for an online-only multiplayer game. There will OF COURSE be bugs and glitches, but the scrutiny will be intense.

I think the competition-light launch window will be good for getting those who are maybe on the fence involved, but it does also mean greater visibility.

That's not good enough. They could go all out, put everything they've got into internal testing and private alphas and still have a buggy disaster launch, because it's an online multiplayer game.  You just don't know what your problems are going to be at scale until you are at scale. Best you can do is run public betas that approach a representative fraction of full scale. Internal testing and private alphas don't even come close to a representative fraction.

Let's say you get, very conservatively, 1 million players per platform on day one. How does testing with 10s of players (internally, simultaneously), or 100s of players (private alpha) give you any notion of what it's like to serve 3 million players across the globe simultaneously? Or, again conservatively, maybe it's only 1 million simultaneously, due to timezones, but it's a rolling 1 million 24x7.

I'll make a prediction: matchmaking, or any feature that tries to share data across the full spectrum of active online players, will be a weak point. Interconnects to other services, like EA Origin friends list, will be another weak point. Finally, interconnects between EA and console services (Sony, Microsoft) will be another weak points. One or more of them will be broken on launch day. It's more a matter of how long it will take for them to fix those problems than whether they will happen or not.

Ditto

Competition wise I think it's alright. Kingdom 3 will be nearly a month previous the anthens launch, RE2 remake is just going to be another game that people don't buy in bulk (Simply cause people don't buy what they've already played and by that I mean most don't). Crackdown 3 still has potential to be delayed yet again, it could end up being a disaster if development hell was that big if an issue for it, even then I think the crackdown IP has lost so much interest over the years because of how quiet it's been. Everything else I've never heard of so that should mean nothing to anthem. It then benefits with the division 2 coming out after it's already out.

The only issue I'd worry about is the lack of various titles, the less games that launch, the easier it is for the media to focus on one, especially if it ends up being trash. At least during holiday season it gets harder for people to focus on one thing when there's also 5 or 6 other AAA games launching beside you, anthem won't have that luxury but Bioware games always launch in dry periods.