The games industry and specialist gaming media spend the best part of the year gearing up for Christmas (or, if you are an American marketing exec, 'the holidays'), by far the busiest time of year, with the release schedules packed full of triple-A gaming gems.

Yet every year, the closer we get to it, the greater the feeling of disappointment becomes. Don't get me wrong – this year's big hitters, from games such as Fallout 3 and Gears 2 for the hardcore through to LittleBigPlanet and Wii Music for 'the casuals' - are certainly worth your hard-earned. (Not forgetting that, in addition to those aforementioned titles, TechRadar kindly informed you of the 12 essential titles that you need to be playing this yule).

But we've also hit that awful moment of anti-climax, the inevitable feeling of 'what now?' that follows once the big boy publishers have finally punted their Xmas titles into stores. Like a five-year-old at 11am on Christmas Day morning, sat by the tree surrounded by wrapping paper, we've opened all our goodies, yet we still want more.

The over-busy release list problem is not so acute for those few big name, cash rich developers that are able to concentrate on quality over quantity (Bethesda and Nintendo's own in-house teams spring to mind), although devs that are not tied to the 'tyranny of release dates' are an increasingly rare breed. Also, let's not forget that most publishers have to deal with the depressing reality that only 4 per cent of games actually turn a profit, and thus need to concentrate on squeezing those last bits of essential pre-Xmas coverage out of the mainstream and specialist press, while keeping a close eye on their growing list of titles scheduled for release in 'Q1', with the next busy release schedule clustered around the Easter hols.

On which note, it seems from this week's news that Sony plans to mark Easter '09 with a price-cut for the PlayStation 3 in Europe, which will tie-in nicely with those Killzone 2 bundles we'll be seeing next to the cheap chocolate eggs on the shelves in our local Woolies (or not, of course, with the imminent threat of bankruptcy looming over the ailing retailer). And with the credit crunch inevitably going to bite the bottom feeders of the gaming industry next year, there are those out there who feel that a cull could well be good news for us, the gamers.

As we enter the season of good will to all, let's also spare a thought for the poor public relations agents too, working hard at the coal face of "trying to ensure their clients' games get widespread, positive exposure in the media" in the midst of the heaving Xmas throng. Although at times, inevitably, they overstep the mark, as one slightly disingenuous rep at Eidos' UK PR company did this last week, informing Videogaming 24/7's Patrick Garratt: "That's right. We're trying to manage the review scores at the request of Eidos.... we're trying to get the Metacritic rating to be high, and the brand manager in the US that's handling all of Tomb Raider has asked that we just manage the scores before the game is out, really, just to ensure that we don't put people off buying the game, basically."

Riiiiiiiight, so that doesn't really clear that up, then....