NCAA 11 and Madden 11 Early Release?

Check out this image that was first posted in the forum. Walmart promotional materials are advertising that NCAA Football 11 will be in stores on July 6th while Madden will arrive on July 27th. Those dates are a week early for NCAA and two weeks early for Madden. So lets go ahead and run through a few possibilities of what this could amount too.

1- Walmart screwed up and they simply printed the wrong dates.

• For: Walmart deals with a lot more than video games so maybe an error of this magnitude could slip through. Preordering on the website gives estimated arrival dates of 7/13 and 8/10 (the official dates).

• Against: Release date errors for both games? One week for one and two for the other? The games have had concrete release dates set for months. The website does not prominently display an actual release date.

2- EA is going to surprise with early releases for both.

• For: EA has moved games up at the last minute a few times before.  A couple of the MVP Baseball releases jumped by a week with no notice prior to when the leagues started specifying the earliest dates they could go out. Last year EA tried to make the Madden release an event by hitting stores on a Friday, they could possibly look to try something different and make a splash.

• Against: Marketing focuses on a set date for launch and plans events around it. Doubtful they would want to shorten the window between the two games by a week.

3- Walmart will have an exclusive early release

• For: This was the early suggestion and the extremely unlikely to have any merit.

• Against: There is no way a company would agree to release early through just one outlet even if they were as big as Walmart. They would be screwing over everyone who preordered at Gamestop or elsewhere and would certainly draw the ire of the other retailers.

So is there anything to this? Probably not. I wouldn’t get excited about it. But it doesn’t hurt to speculate if it could mean something. Any thoughts on the matter as always feel free to leave them in the comments!