With the Steam Scream Fest currently in full swing, and our Halloween-themed murder mystery SHINRAI – Broken Beyond Despair on sale, I thought it’s a good opportunity to make another little news post over on the Steam store page to provide an update on our next project GENBA no Kizuna, particularly regarding our release plans for it. Due to the event, we’re gonna have more eyes again on the SHINRAI page after all, and hopefully more people checking out the GENBA store page as well!
Now, if you haven’t read that Steam post yet, don’t fret! I’m gonna go over everything here as well and in a bit more detail even.
If you’ve checked out our store page for GENBA before, you’ll notice that the release date displayed there has changed now.
It no longer say “2023”, but “Q1 2024”, so yes… as unfortunate as it may be, we have decided to push the release back.
While I do still feel confident that the project will be finished before the end of 2023, we simply won’t be able to wrap it all up within the next two weeks and, sadly, mid-November is really the last good release window in our opinion. At the end of the month, Steam will hold its autumn sale and once that’s over, we will already head into the festive season with the winter sale following soon after.
I never understood why Steam is having two huge seasonal sales this close to one another, even less so after they reorganized their sales schedule last year, because, in their very own words: “customers will be better served by a little bit more time between the big Steam-wide seasonal sales“. Then again, when did the reasoning behind Steam’s decisions ever truly make any sense…?
Anyway, given their wise decision to spread out major sales with such huge gaps between them, there’s a whopping three weeks between the end of the autumn sale and the beginning of the winter sale. Ergo, starting from the end of November, the remainder of the year will be packed with huge sales during which essentially everything is gonna be on discount (as opposed to a themed sale that only really features spooky games, for instance). December is also usually a time with tons of new releases, so that final month tends to devolve into an all-out battle with just about every developer in existence fighting over people’s holiday funds.
In other words, it’s not the best time for a tiny indie dev to release their niche project and hope to sell at full price, haha…
The release week is obviously very important to a game and we really don’t want to screw that up and have a bad start.
Therefore, rather than risk being drowned out in the massive number of games on sale in December, we’ve decided to wait a little longer until people will have recovered from their holiday spending spree, and picked a time frame with not much going on in terms of major sales events and competition. According to some marketing strategists, February, March and April are good release months. Incidentally, Steam will also have another Fest in that time period, with a theme that would be a perfect fit for GENBA.
So that’s what we’re now aiming for. Again, we’re still gonna work hard to have the project fully done by the end of this year, but there is still a lot to do and some extra time will only be beneficial for testing and polish.
That said, it’s obviously still a Dreadnoughtus-sized bummer, since we can’t wait to finally release this project ourselves, but welp… that’s the way the fossil crumbles I guess. Really sorry about yet another delay. As stated in the Steam post, these aren’t the kinda spooky horror news we wanted to share with you guys this Halloween, but we hope you can understand our reasons.
After all the time we’ve spent working on this, we sure as heck don’t wanna rush things on the final stretch now and risk the resolution of the case ending up feeling that way.
Now, with all of that said, I’m still hesitant about narrowing down the release date too much, since we don’t yet know if Steam will actually invite us to the aforementioned Fest and deem GENBA a “good fit” for it (certainly wouldn’t be the first time) and I’m also not quite sure yet if we would want to release during the event itself, or rather use it as a final push to get as many eyes as possible on GENBA right before it’s gonna come out…
Those are still things we will have to think about, but we will give you some more clarification early next year, probably with our annual “Plans for the new year” post, so be sure to keep your eyes peeled for that!
For now, however, we hope you’re gonna have a spooky time and already wish you a Happy Halloween!! ~°w°~
