Deep Silver and Comcept have confirmed that, as rumored, Keiji Inafune's Mighty No. 9 will not be coming out this year. In a Kickstarter update posted today, Comcept said there is currently no release date set, but it's aiming to have the game ready to go in the first quarter of 2016.
"As we have communicated in the updates to our backers, all of the core content for the game is developed and in a complete state," the studio wrote. "However, there are still bugs and issues pertaining to the online features that are included in the game. These bugs and issues have a direct affect on enjoyment of the game, so a decision was made to work these issues out before release."
Furthermore, Comcept has received a number of requests "for additional information regarding the various platforms that are part of the platform survey we have sent out," it said, yet it has only received about half of the responses it required. Because of that, another platform survey will be sent out once a new release date is announced.
Word of the delay first surfaced last week, when Gamestop and Amazon changed their listed launch dates for the game from September 15—which itself represented a delay from the original launch target of "spring"—to 12/31/2016. Neither Comcept nor Deep Silver commented on the report at the time; for some reason, Comcept said in the Kickstarter update that it wanted to wait until Gamescom to announce the delay. Because hey, why not make a splash with the bad news?
In a separate statement, publisher Deep Silver said, "We can acknowledge that the game will no longer meet its current release date and will now in fact appear in Q1 2016. We will announce a firm release date and further details once we have it."
Following the usual convention of delay announcements, Comcept thanked backers for their support and patience, but based on the Kickstarter comments there may not be as much of that as the studio would like. A significant number of backers have expressed disappointment and worse, not just because of the delay, but because of the way it was handled, particularly with regards to the now-apparent wait between informing retailers of the delay, and telling backers. The number of commenters is a very tiny slice of the more than 67,000 total backers, but fair or not, dissatisfaction is clearly growing.
