Overkill’s TWD Console Release Postponed

Oof. So we’ve been pretty harsh on Overkill’s TWD, what has thus far been a mostly unfinished feeling experience riddled with poor design decisions and dull, repetitive combat. Apparently, we weren’t the only ones, as parent company Starbreeze went into a panic when the game sold unexpectedly low, and now the console port, which was set to release next month, has been postponed. From a press release sent out today, Starbreeze elaborates:

Starbreeze AB is currently evaluating and reviewing the performance of the game OVERKILL’s The Walking Dead on consoles. Starbreeze has decided to postpone the release date from its original February 2019 date, further information regarding the future release will be announced at a later date.

Oooof. There’s no way to know, of course, but the lack of a new date has a sort of… indefinitely postponed vibe about it. The PC version is still getting updates every now and again, although we haven’t been back in some time to check on how much it’s been upgraded after our tiresome and unenjoyable attempts in the few weeks after launch. One would assume that those patches could be made and adjusted to the console ports mostly easy, but the words “evaluating and reviewing the performance of the game” could have multiple meanings. Performance of the actual programming itself (which in our experience has been exceedingly poor), or performance of the sales. It’s very possible that this is a light cancellation to reevaluate whether they’d lose more money with a console release than they’d make. According to Steam Charts, the average number of daily players has dropped below 1,000 — which is pretty devastating for a game that has an all-time high of 14,000, to say the least.

It’ll be interesting to see if Overkill’s TWD is able to recover, but as I mentioned in the past — it is yet another victim to the routine and unwelcome ideology of release now, patch later. Get it right the first time, and you probably wouldn’t be having this issue.