Xenonauts 2 is not coming out this month, despite what you may have heard By Ian Boudreau

There’s some confusion surrounding the Xenonauts 2 release date: On the Steam page, you get a vague “March 2019,” and Google provides a more specific March 14 if you look up the term. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. Developer Goldhawk Interactive says Xenonauts 2 isn’t ready for Early Access yet, but they will have a new build going out to Kickstarter backers in a few days.

Goldhawk says Beta Build V3 will head out to backers on Tuesday, March 12. It’ll be the first Xenonauts 2 beta build where the developers have begun considering “the gameplay experience rather than just purely stability and functionality,” according to a post to the Xenonauts forums last Friday.

The March timeframe was part of Goldhawk’s initial plans for an Early Access launch, but the developers say that’s going to be delayed, probably by a few months.

“We don’t think the game is polished enough of has enough content for an Early Access launch,” they write. “Any negative reviews we receive now will last forever and potentially reduce sales for the entire lifetime of the game, and as our finances are still relatively solid there’s not really any need for us to risk it happening to us.”

It’s always tempting to be disappointed by delays in games we’re looking forward to, particularly when it’s with a follow-up to a truly excellent spin on Microprose’s classic turn-based tactics game. However, it’s encouraging to hear that Goldhawk Interactive is financially stable enough to not have to rush Xenonauts 2 out to market - more time in development is almost always a good thing (to a point, at least), and as they’ve wisely pointed out, putting an unfinished product on the market can turn off a lot of potential players.

Here's the trailer Goldhawk put together for the Kickstarter campaign:

Interestingly, if you check out Xenonauts 2’s entry on SteamDB, you can check the revision history and see that someone at Goldhawk changed the Steam Release Date value to March 16, 2019 a couple weeks ago, on February 22. That was removed two days later, but those changes may be the source of the misinformation that’s still circulating on reddit and elsewhere.

If you are still itching to get your hands on a beta key, Goldhawk says they’re looking at ways to make this work, whether through Xsolla or another rights management system. That way, folks who missed out on the wildly-successful Kickstarter campaign can still contribute to development and try out early builds, and still have a GOG or Steam key waiting for them when those become available. If that does end up happening, we’ll be sure to let you know.