CD Projekt Red's Delays are Delaying Other Studios Now

CD Projekt Red's Cyberpunk 2077 might be the biggest game launch in recent memory: so much so that other games will dive out of the way to avoid being in its mammoth trajectory.

Now, that's not unusual: game devs schedule their releases around each other all the time to avoid competition, particularly with big-name launches like Call of Duty. But the level of earnestness around Cyberpunk 2077 is a bit strange. First, for example, we had the Grounded devs put out a trailer that said, "hey we know we're not Cyberpunk 2077 but at least we come out sooner", and now, we've got the folks at Path of Exile who just announced that they'd rather postpone their own expansion than try to release it at the same time as the newly-postponed Cyberpunk 2077.

We were previously targeting a launch date of December 11 for our 3.13 end-game expansion. As we discussed last week, our new development methodology gives us confidence that we'd be able to hit this date with a high quality expansion. Yesterday, CD Projekt Red announced that Cyberpunk 2077 will now be released on December 10. We do not want to put our players in a position of having to choose between these two games, so we have decided to step out of the way and delay the release of Path of Exile 3.13 until January.

We still expect to finish 3.13 by early/mid-December. The scope of this expansion will remain unchanged. During the month of delay before release, we will start work on the 3.14 expansion

They also closed out their announcement with this charming aside:

In the meantime, let's all get out our Albino Rhoa Feathers and pray to Kuduku that they don't delay again.

Of course, CD Projekt Red isn't responsible for other developers postponing their work to get out of their way, but it would certainly be a kindness to everyone involved -- their players, their own team, and other developers -- if this was the last delay we had to deal with.