The coronavirus pandemic has caused a lot of upheaval in many areas of the world, including in video game development. Xbox boss Phil Spencer has now gone on record saying that he expects that future game delays will be continuing through 2021 and beyond due to the virus’s impact on development.
Many gaming studios have had to make enormous adjustments to their staff and work schedules in order to adjust to the coronavirus, including working from home or outright delaying their games when they’re unable to do it properly.
While some game development studios like CD Projekt RED have apparently been doing fine with the pandemic, other studios that have had games who were supposed to either be out by now or were coming soon are now being forced to scramble for more time.
Even if the problem isn’t with game development, however, things can still go south even for a Triple-A studio and cause future game delays. Naughty Dog, for instance, was forced to delay The Last Of Us 2 despite the game being very nearly ready to go not because of a lack of progress, but logistics issues.
While the game has since been declared gold and is being readied to release on June 19, many other games and their studios can’t say the same, such as inXile Entertainment, the developers of the Wasteland series. inXile has been forced to delay Wasteland 3 after making the transition to home development has proven difficult.
There’s no telling exactly how accurate Spencer’s comments will prove to be, but considering there’s no end currently in sight for the pandemic, we may indeed see future game delays happening a lot for the next few years. Hopefully that won’t end up happening and the pandemic will end soon, but again, we can’t be sure without actually knowing for ourselves.
