Near Yet Far: Stars Beyond Reach Now Due In September
Strat 'em up
Do you remember how Arcen Games had planned to launch their alien 4X strategy game Stars Beyond Reach [official site] on June 5th? Well, yeah, you can guess how that worked out. But this time, for real, for really real, they have a release date: September 25th.
The Last Federation and Valley Without Wind devs decided to delay their new game than release it wonky, figuring that the game being in development longer will cost them less than if they were to released it "substandard". You might think that fairly obvious, but some people nowadays...
Arcen explain in a blog post:
"Arcen just had a reasonable windfall what with the Steam Summer Sale and the Daily Deal for TLF. Between the two of those, that was more than a third of our income so far this year (it’s been a slack year). This delay does raise the bar yet again on how much the game has to gross to break even, but that’s frankly unavoidable at this point.
"And I do think that we can really recoup this. Both TLF and AI War have exceeded the amount it will take to break even on this game, and I think this game will be notably more attractive to customers than TLF - if we finish this up right. As for the total yearly income for the company, I think that the biggest blow would be releasing a substandard game rather than a delay of (sigh, yet another) another month."
They plan to use the delay for polishing, balancing, honing the game's systems, and so on.
A delay's a delay, but do go read the blog post for some interesting chat on why diplomacy in 4X games usually sucks, and how Stars Beyond Reach tries to do it differently.
Here's a short SBR gameplay trailer from a few months back:
