#game delay

There's still a lot of games that get released each year and most of them don't make the news for delays, they just release and move on. Here's a list of titles that shipped this year and did not have publicized delays:

Mario Kart World

DK Bananza

Kingdom Come Deliverance II

Civ 7

Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii

Monster Hunter Wilds

Fatal Fury: City of the Worlds

Forza Horizon 5

Doom: The Dark Ages

Elden Ring Nightreign

These are all AAA game releases from 2025 so far. In addition to these, we can also expect to see our annual Call of Duty, EA Sports titles, and 2k Sports titles release on time, because they always do. How many AAA games have been delayed this year? Do you think it is more or fewer than these? The majority of game releases don't get delayed. The news tends to report on the ones that do, so it just feels like there's a lot more than there really are.

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God of War Ragnarok Reportedly Launching November 2022

 Following God of War Ragnarok’s absense at last week’s State of Play and yesterday’s Summer Games Fest, many began to worry that it too would slip to next year. However, it appears that the game will release this year, and we won’t have to wait much longer to see it.

Check it!

If there's anything relevant I'll make a post but I can't watch game play until tonight or tomorrow. I doubt we'll get anything relevant for my blog and it's arcade so it's not my thing to judge personally so I won't have anything game play wise to talk about.

Kudos to Scott for being the VIP and giving his fans something to hold them over while announcing a second delay (SB has been pushed back to Q4 of 2021)

Of course a studio can delay the launch, but a launch delay will have its own set of consequences. Remember, no game launches in a vacuum. Timing is the key factor.

The most obvious consequence goes back to the adage "Time is money". The developers working on the game need to pay rent and buy food. The studio needs to pay those developers during that time to keep them employed. Those costs don't go away when the game's launch is delayed - they will still accumulate. If the studio doesn't have the money they need to keep the lights on during that delay, it won't be able to make payroll for its employees or pay its bills/debt. In such a situation, a delay is impossible - the company will die without money from the game sales.

The second consequence is about the state of the gaming world over time. Imagine that we delay our game to dodge Hades 2. What happens after Hades 2? Will we need to dodge another big release? Will we need to dodge another competitor in our specific game genre? Will the market still be good for our game? Will the platform still be good? Remember, Facebook was a major gaming platform for years and then it wasn't. Imagine spending two years and millions of dollars to develop a major Facebook game only to have the platform die out from under you before launch. Things always change over time.

These two consequences feed into each other - every day we delay, more things change and new problems arise. Every day we delay, costs build up that we need to pay for somehow. Every day we delay release, our income on the game remains zero. At some point, the game will need to launch or the company will assuredly die.

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Digimon Survive Officially Delayed to 2022

There had been discussion on a delay to 2022 for quite some time for the latest Digimon video game, mostly due to the lack of information at all regarding the title. Now we know for sure that this is the case, and it’s being pushed back to 2022.

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The writing was on the wall when they announced the delay after going gold. The warning signs were already there before then - CDPR is fairly well-known in the industry for their sweatshop working conditions and pay, the game had been in development since the PS3/X360 console generation, and there had been multiple delays - but the post-gold delay really confirmed that it was going to be a hot, buggy mess. So let’s talk about it for a moment.

First, Cyberpunk’s extremely long development cycle basically meant that the leadership couldn’t figure out what they wanted the game to be for a very long time. Nobody plans to take eight years to build a game - the video game market changes and evolves way too quickly for that to happen. When Cyberpunk was announced, League of Legends hadn’t hit its peak yet and everybody was starting to fall off of the big AAA MMOG boom. Hearthstone didn’t exist. Fortnite didn’t exist. Players were all super excited to play COD: BLOPS 2. Having a dev cycle take longer than 4 years generally means the dev team wasted a lot of time building things, discovering they didn’t work, and then throwing them out. The finished Cyberpunk isn’t the sum of eight years of work, it’s the sum of maybe three years of work and five additional years of cut systems and content. 

Second, CDPR is already known in the industry for their brutal working conditions. They’re a crunch culture studio and there have been confirmations from one of the devs on Cyberpunk that they’ve been crunching on it since at least June of 2019 despite public assurances that it wasn’t mandatory. These kind of working conditions are nothing new; they did it for the Witcher 3, they did it for the Witcher 2, and there’s no reason to think they won’t continue in the future since it clearly continues to work for them. Unfortunately, the effect of the exhausted dev team gets multiplied by the systemic effects of delaying the game as well.

Finally, Cyberpunk was also delayed several times - in January, then in June, then again in November. Delays are never planned into the schedule - they are responses to shit hitting the fan. They only occur when the producers realize that there is no way that they’ll be able to hit their target that they delay the game. There are several reasons for this, primarily budgetary - changing release dates greatly affects the marketing campaign, business deals, as well as the overall development cost of the game. Thus, delays are usually a last resort - the added time is the minimum estimated time to reach the goal by crunching super hard to get past the finish line. The fact that they had to delay three separate times meant that they blew their estimates and schedules three times and had to course-correct each time. This is why the effect of the death march crunch mentioned previously gets multiplied - the devs have already been on a year-long deathmarch crunch and are exhausted, causing their work to suffer. Delaying on top of that means that their work will continue to suffer.

Cyberpunk is the result of multiple contributing factors - years in development hell, a brutal sweatshop studio culture, and all exacerbated by pivoting due to delays changing the schedule. It is the result of bad planning multiplied by developer exhaustion, compounded by sudden scope and schedule changes. All of the warning signs were already there if you knew where to look. I actually would have been very surprised if this wasn’t the resultant state of Cyberpunk at launch.

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The answer to this question is “kind of”. When we plan a game’s development process out, we create a production schedule with milestones along the way to define specific states the in-progress game should reach by certain key dates, leading up to a ship deadline. We may adjust the schedule slightly as we proceed, but the general time frame usually remains the same - this is how long we expect the game to take to build. When a game is delayed, this is the recognition of a failure in the plan - the team leaders looked at the schedule we made and realized that we’re not going to be able to deliver what was promised by the day it was promised. 

There can be many different reasons to delay a game. One such reason is that the original planned goals are no longer viable, so the plan for the game itself must be re-designed if the project is to continue development. These delays are often a do-or-die situation - if the redesigned plan does not get approved, the entire game project may be cancelled. This kind of delay generally happens early in development because redesigning a game means throwing out much of the work that has already been done up to that point. The more work that has to be thrown out, the more wasteful it is because all that wasted work represents development time and budget spent that we can’t get back. When Nintendo announced that Metroid Prime 4 was being redesigned, this is almost certainly the situation that happened. In this sense, it is “adding more” to the game in that there will be new content and mechanics added to the game, but also that a lot of old content and mechanics are cut entirely.

The more common major reason that a game is delayed is that the game is almost but not good enough quality to ship. Typically this means that there are a lot of bugs and gameplay that feels rough or unfun in some or many parts. In these situations, any delay is the minimum amount of time to fix enough bugs and polish enough content such that the game is good enough to pass certification and ship. The final delay for many games like Cyberpunk 2077 falls into this category. In this kind of situation, a delay adds “more” in the form of bug fixes and some polish that are necessary to meet the minimum requirements for launch, but would not add “more” new content that wasn’t originally planned before the delay was approved. At this point, our goal is just to finish what we have.

This also doesn’t cover all of the other potential reasons for a delay like legal/contractual reasons (e.g. if the game is using a license and the licensor has issues with the release schedule), corporate reasons (e.g. the publisher gets bought out by another company), or other reasons (e.g. key members of the team leadership pass away). In most of these kinds of cases, there isn’t the approval built in for new content added during the delay. Overall, the key takeaway is why games get delayed. Delays aren’t put in just because we feel like adding more to the game, but because we have a planned target and we realize we’re not going to hit it for some reason and need to bridge that gap. 

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