Julian Gollop and Snapshot Games have delayed Phoenix Point in order to further polish the game, and “to make a bigger splash”. After a successful Fig campaign, the game has slowly been inching towards release. The crowdfunded title that’s the spiritual successor to the original XCOM has been pushed back, disappointing fans.
Our crowdfunding campaign last year was very successful,” he said in a backer update, “but we needed to expand the team to meet the high production values that we were aiming for. In order to meet the quality that many people expect and to use the full potential of our expanded team, I’ve decided to push back our target release date to June 2019. Backers will continue to get playable builds that include major changes over the next year.
The update from Gollop reads:
When we launched our crowdfunding campaign for Phoenix Point in May 2017, we hoped that the game would be well received. But what has happened since has been phenomenal, with increasingly strong pre-orders and great press coverage. People’s expectations are higher, our team is growing, and Phoenix Point has become a bigger game. In order to realise this potential we need to push back the target release date to June 2019.
I believe we can create a game with high production values that will make a huge splash on launch. In order to achieve this we need to continue to expand the team and maintain our focus on quality. To be honest, this has been a slower process than I wanted, but I felt that we needed the best talent that we could find. I am glad to say that we now have 35 great developers in our Sofia studio, and as a consequence of our recent, excellent exposure we are attracting offers of help from game developers around the world.
For our backers who have pre-ordered the luxury digital edition we will commit to a new Backer Build at least once every two months up to the point of release.
I hope you will support our decision, which I believe is in the best long term interests of the game, and on behalf of the whole team we would like to thank all our backers for their support and faith in our vision for this ambitious and exciting project.
Phoenix Point will now not make it out by the end of this year but will arrive in June 2019.
