Happy May everyone! For those of us in the northern hemisphere, May 1st is a sure sign of warmer weather, and of a brand new month. For the international community, it’s a day for holidays! Yep, time to take the day off to celebrate International Workers’ Day, commonly known as Labour Day! Let’s take a load off, and appreciate all the work that we do year-round.

Unless you’re in here in the US or Canada. Then we have to wait till the end of the summer – three of the least productive months – to appreciate all our hard work.

It’s only fair.

I mean, the Haymarket incident in Chicago is still pretty raw after 127 years. Plus, even back then we had concerns about association with this new idea called Communism. . .

Alright, but we still get May Day right? That’s pretty harmless and celebrated widely across the globe?

No?

Oh. We stopped doing that? Why?

Ah. It’s antiquated, Ok, that’s fair.

Wait, and issues with Communism again?

Boy were we obsessed with that or what?

So, how about Beltane? Celtic pagan holid….you know what, never mind. I know the answer to that one. I can get looks in some parts of this country just for saying the word pagan.

Well…shoot. That’s upsetting. I guess today for us in the US May 1st is just . . . Wednesday? Unless you’re Hawaii, in which case you get your own cultural..holiday..thing. But it’s only good in Hawaii, and that’s thousands of miles away.

What a crappy deal. . .

You know what? That’s it! I’m canceling the Spotlight too! Because of pagan Communist Hawaiians.

Or because we just don’t have one to show you this month. We don’t want to force a game onto center stage just because we have a pulpit for it. We exert a lot of effort to find a game that we feel really stands out, and while we surely can’t catch every game that’s released (I’d bet there’s one that just has, or is about to, come out that’s probably decent), we didn’t have the opportunity to see it in action. Maybe we missed a publisher, or they never got back to us. From what we’ve seen though, May is tough for game publication. Because so many games are manufactured (at least in part) in China, and they take most of February off for their own holiday, this causes a disruption in the release process. The math bears out that it’s just hard for this window. Even if it was out the door March 1st, you add in the 6-8 weeks to travel by boat, then customs, warehousing, packaging, stocking, etc. etc.

So, our Spotlight will be shut off for the month of May. It’s not that we’re stopping it by any means. If anything, looking at what the summer has in store for us, it’s more the calm before the storm.

Be sure to keep looking at the site, as we’ll still be doing our normal stuff with a few extras thrown in. For the Spotlight though, just wait for what June has in store!