The movie industry has a predictable release cycle: The beginning of the year is a dumping ground for terrible movies; from Labor Day to about the middle of August, the studios release their “sure things” – vapid blockbusters designed to wrangle in viewers based on star power and the special effects; and family friendly comedies, prestige pictures, and Oscar bait saturate the release calendar between Thanksgiving and the new year. The video game industry has a release cycle that’s just as predictable. It’s simple, really: everything releases in November.

Maybe, at some point in the future, video game publishers will understand that nobody has the time to play 60 AAA titles in one month. Hell, few people have the time to play 60 games, regardless of their quality, over an entire year. The “core” gamers, as Microsoft has so eloquently named them, lament the shortening of the video game. Sure, I spent 100 hours with Oblivion just like everyone else, and more or less loved every minute of it (except around the 12 hour mark when I figured out how the leveling system works and realized that my thief, though very good at speechcraft and sneaking through the shadows, didn’t stand much of a chance against a pair of ogres). However, I see twelve, ten, and six hour games as a blessing rather than a curse. Shorter games means there’s time to play more of them, and allows developers to craft tighter, cleverer experiences. Look at Portal, arguably the best game of the year (hint: there’s no arguing about it), which clocks in at three hours at most, and proves that if a development team is talented and dedicated enough, they can compress an entire gaming experience into the length of a feature film without any major compromises.

You see, gaming is a unique medium in that nearly all its fans keep backlogs. There are simply too many good games to do otherwise. Nobody has a backlog of films to see, unless you count a Netflix queue, but at three or four hours maximum, tearing through a movie backlog isn’t a considerable feat. The way the games industry works, however, forces people to buy all their games in November and then spend the rest of the year playing through them. There’s even a site called The Backloggery that allows users to keep track of their backlogs in full social networking, Web 2.0 glory.

I don’t own any of the next gen consoles, though not for a lack of wanting. The closest I get is with my blue DS (not Lite). And despite this, I have only just now, two years after the Xbox 360 heralded the beginning of the current generation, finished working through my backlog. Or rather, finished working through as much of it as I can stand. Of course, there are still a handful of last generation games I would like to play through like God of War 2 and Contra: Shattered Soldier.

It’s no wonder the minigame collections that define the Wii’s software library are selling so well. While they are obviously more approachable because of their simplified controls and interfaces, they also don’t require the obscene time investments of more traditional genres. Developers like to bitch and moan about the rising cost of video game development, but maybe they should be spending their time cutting all the fat they pour into games instead. I’m not saying every game should be a slim Portal-esque experience – I welcome an epic RPG as much as the next guy – but either publishers need to stop dumping all their games that are worth a damn over the same four weeks at the end of the year, or they need to start allowing their developers to build more streamlined experiences, including ones that don’t involve minigames.