In a move that may surprise nobody, Overkill’s The Walking Dead’s console release may be postponed indefinitely. Starbreeze Studios, Owners of Overkill Software, announced the move last Friday. In the two sentence statement, they claimed to be “reviewing the performance of the console version”. The game now sits in limbo with a new release date yet to be announced.

This doesn’t bode well for Starbreeze, who filed for the Swedish equivalent of bankruptcy last December. This lead the recent resignation of various  executives from their board.  All this happened simultaneously while the Swedish Economic Crime Authority carried out raids on several locations, including Starbreeze’s headquarters, and arrested an employee, as part of a case involving insider trading within the company.

A recurring  trend?

Overkill’s The Walking Dead has had a troubled development. It was announced in 2014, when interest in The Walking Dead franchise, and zombies in general, had waned. The  game was scheduled to launch in 2016 before being pushed back to 2017 and then  to 2018. It then received a November release date on all platforms at last year’s E3. The console release was then pushed back a further 6 months in August.

A troubled release.

Since release, the PC version has suffered countless problems. With a lack of voice chat, lack of checkpoints, strange difficulty spikes, and a dependence on Co-Op play, the game has been labelled by players as a “glitchy ******* mess”, “not very fun” and a “waste of money”.  It has a “Mixed” rating on steam, and has seen a drastic drop in players since  release.  Critics have also panned the game, with it holding a score of 52 on Metacritic.

With the publishers future uncertain and the game receiving poor reviews, its safe to say we wont be seeing a console release  anytime soon.