It’s video game delay season. And release date season, too.
Kingdom Come II slips to 2025, but Dragon Age: The Veilguard will still make 2024
It’s that time of year, when video game makers reckon with whether they can hammer their games into decent shape by Christmas—or if they might as well push them until after the ball drops in Times Square.
This morning, The Embracer Group confirmed that its biggest planned holiday 2024 release, the medieval role playing game Kingdom Come Deliverance II, will instead launch in February 2025.
The theory is that the added time will help. At least, that was Embracer CEO Lars Wingefors’ pitch to investors during a meeting this morning. (Not clear that they bought it; the stock is down 7% today, off of low earnings, too).
Of Kingdom Come’s delay, Wingefors said: “The game would be a few months more polished and better to the fans, with a potentially more optimized time window for release.
November is a particularly expensive time to market a new game, Wingefors said, given that some of the year’s biggest games come out around then.
The delay isn’t that long and will keep Kingdom Come within Embracer’s fiscal year, ending March 31. That’s when a lot of companies’ business calendars flip into the new year and why so many of the games that slip from the holiday season get stuffed into February and March.
Embracer isn’t the only firm busy delaying games lately.
Two weeks ago, Microsoft pushed its first-party, first-person role-playing game Avowed from late 2024 to… February, citing a crowded fall. (Wait a minute…)
Earlier this week, Nacon delayed Terminator: Survivors from October to 2025.
Also this week, the 2D cyberpunk indie game Replaced, which has been featured in some Xbox showcases, was delayed to 2025. The developers said they postponed it “to ensure we meet the high standards we’ve set for ourselves and to meet the expectations of our fans.”
Delays tend to benefit games, developers say, and none of this is all that unusual or unexpected.
Over the last few weeks, most of the publicly-traded game companies reported their latest quarterly results, providing them good reason to come to grips with what’s achievable and what needs more time (Ubisoft used their investor update in July to push Rainbow Six Mobile and The Division: Resurgence past April 1, 2025).
It also behooves game developers and publishers to get their release plans sorted ahead of the trifecta of public gaming shows that close the summer promotional calendar. There’s Gamescom in Germany next week, PAX West in the U.S. the week after that and then late September’s Tokyo Game Show.
All of the above is also why this stretch doubles as delay season and time-to-finally-announce-a-release-date season.
Just today:
EA finally put a date on Dragon Age: The Veilguard – Oct. 31.
Bethesda did the same for mobile Fallout Shelter successor The Elder Scrolls Castles - Sept. 10
And Devolver marked The Plucky Squire, the magical 2D (and 3D!) adventure that has previewed really well, for Sept. 17.
The biggest supposed 2024 releases that still lack specific release dates are: Starfield expansion Shattered Space, MachineGames’ Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, and Sony’s first PS5/PC/Switch release, Lego Horizon Adventures. It’d be reasonable to expect release date news for those as soon as next Tuesday’s Gamescom kick-off festivities.
In brief
💡 Promising upcoming game ideas: Let’s Build A Dungeon (PC, Xbox), from Let’s Build a Zoo makers Springloaded, is a strategy game about creating a massively multiplayer online game; Barkour(PC), from Varsav Studios, is a stealth game in which you play as a secret agent dog.
🎬 Amazon Prime and “Love, Death & Robots” creators Blur Studio are creating an animated anthology series called Secret Level, that could feature new stories in known video game worlds, Deadline reports.
🏋️ Activision says that the download size of this year’s Call of Duty will be smaller than last year’s, as it works on optimizations to get the franchise’s gargantuan 100-300GB downloads under control, The Verge reports.
🤔 Capcom management, when asked by an investor recently if “AI [will] significantly improve development efficiency,” didn’t exactly respond with a “yes.”
Their answer, per a newly released Q&A translated by the company: “[W]e have been improving the efficiency of development using our own engine for some time, and we will continue to verify the introduction of AI.”
The reference to an engine is the RE Engine, which has been used to build a growing share of of Capcom’s biggest games since 2017’s Resident Evil 7. The company has previously said that implementing AI into a game development workflow is a “tricky situation.”