CANCELLING A GAME: THE HARDEST ANNOUNCEMENT OF ALL
Last Wednesday, BioWare posted its own goodbye and while I’m sadly used to studio closures, this one hurt more.
Cancelling a game or closing a studio are the worst announcements, and most of the time they’re done poorly too. A black screen with white text stating how sad everyone is and how talented everyone is… There’s nothing more to sell, nothing to look forward. Just people losing their jobs and fans who need to heal their hearts.
A delay is good news. Usually.
So compared to a cancellation, announcing a delay looks easy and is very often seen positively.
“A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad” from not-Shigeru Miyamoto is so famous that it has sunk into players’ minds.
And indeed, after so many rushed launches and disappointments, any sign that the studio, or its publisher, cares more about the game than its fiscal year is welcome.
It’s also baked into the industry and the hype we build as marketers: as long as the genie is in the bottle, we can all keep believing in the game’s promises.
When we delayed Outward 2, the “Take your time” comments collected almost half of all likes under the following trailer, which announced our release date four months after we announced the delay on Steam and Discord.
So announcing a delay works just fine for an indie studio like Nine Dots, and I’ll get to that below, but sometimes it can affect developers and players alike.
- Cyberpunk 2077, October 2020.
The third delay came after the game had gone gold, and after the official account had said there would be no more delays. Most of the team reportedly learned about it by email at the same time as the public. Developers received death threats. Considering the state of the game at release, it might have needed a fourth delay ;). - GTA 6, 2025.
I can’t remember a Rockstar game launching when they first said it would.
I think they like to toy with the industry. God knows how many times I planned around Red Dead Redemption 2’s launch date while working at Ubisoft, on multiple games.
- Subnautica 2, July 2025.
That’s the wackiest delay of them all. In 2025, Krafton pushed Early Access to 2026 days after removing the studio’s founders, who then sued, claiming the game was ready and that the delay protected Krafton from a $250M earnout… Until it didn’t. That’s, for me, one of the craziest industry stories of the decade. The payback is … chef’s kiss
- And sometimes you can poke fun at delays fun. Well if you’re Devolver, taking the counterpoint of the industry while ringing true: see the hilarious “Devolver Delayed Showcase“, where they announced all the games that slipped from 2023 to 2024. But you’re not Devolver.
What we did on Outward 2
On June 16, 2026, we announced that we would be pushing Outward 2’s Early Access from July 7 to 2027.
A month earlier, we had announced our release date with a trailer and a press VIP preview event.
Two weeks earlier, we had released a trailer at the PC Gaming Show inviting everyone to explore Aurai this summer… Like, summer 2026. So yeah, it kind of sent the whole marketing campaign and timeline to the trash, but in reality I wasn’t worried about the reception. The community took it well.
We announced it during the beta. It was easier to get players’ involvement for something they wouldn’t be able to play for a long time during the last stretch of the beta, which was running for an extra week. Over 100,000 players had just played the build, and many of them were telling us it needed more time on Steam, so there’s no arguing we made the right call. It’s also kind of expected that Beta feedback could lead to such changes.
Our CEO Guillaume put it simply in his statement: the point of a playtest is to listen to feedback.
The transparency and honesty of the message were of course well received. You should give real reasons players will understand so they will back your decision to delay.
Have someone answer players when you announce the delay. Guillaume was on Discord to answer the hundreds of messages we got within an hour of announcing the delay.
How much uncertainty do you want to leave? We said “2027” with no month, and didn’t spell out clearly that the game was going to release in Early Access. It’s hard to gauge exactly how vague you want to be, especially if this could open the door to… another delay announcement. Sometimes you need to announce a delay without even a new release window, and that’s the worst you can do IMO.
That created questions that lasted until we revealed our NEW release date.
A delay is an opportunity to pamper your community, and the new date is definitely a good marketing opportunity. Ironically, delaying gave us two “release date trailers”, which are usually reposted by the press, so at least we got that running – and the trailer got 170,000 views in a week, so I guess it was interesting for a lot of people!
That being said, delays don’t sell, and it hurt our wishlists with a surge of deletions.
When you announce a delay, the good strategy is to go silent.
- First, you need to keep everything you planned for your release, so there’s no point in shooting your bullets early.
- Second, like us, you might announce the delay so close to release that you’re already out of bullets and need to restock the magazine with new marketing communications and concepts.
- Finally, every time you communicate about something other than the release date, that will be the most pressing question, and it’ll taint your communication.
TL;DR: what should I do for my delay announcement, then?
So, is announcing a delay really that easy? Yes, if you do it like a human being and not a corporate machine.
This should go without saying, but PLEASE warn your team first, plan for good community management around the delay announcement, give players honest and credible reasons, and make it about pushing the game’s quality, not about solving a problem you didn’t foresee. That would sound like poor management and excuses rather than respect for players. Players are more mature about delays than we give them credit for, as long as you’re honest and present.
Redo your marketing timeline and plan for the best opportunity to announce your NEW Release date – for us it was the III-Initiative, a very good additionnal opportunity to take!
I’d love to hear how your delays announcement have gone!
Come say hi on the Step Up Your Game Discord or add me on LinkedIn.
