Future Astroneers! We have two pieces of news to share with you. On October 7th 2015, when we launched our website and released our first trailer, our team was in a very tight financial situation. We had no external funding, and had made plans to have only three full time partners on the project, living from savings and bearing all development costs out of pocket. Given that unsustainable situation, we had made a deliberate choice to rush the game, in a very early state, to an Early Access launch in late March or early April, because without the early revenue to fund further development, we would be unable to continue.

After the positive reception of our announcement and the warm support from early fans, a number of potential avenues of financing became available. Several weeks ago we were able to secure a small amount of funds from several smaller, non-traditional sources. These extra funds have enabled the entire team to come on to the project full time, and to work on refining the quality of the game for longer before we need to release.

Therefore, having staved off the immediate financial threat, the group of us have decided to extend the development timeline into the latter half of the year, targeting an EA release at the end of summer, beginning of fall. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that the extra time and manpower will enable us to produce a higher quality Early Access release and road map. When we had planned to release in Q1, it was not by choice, and the last thing we wanted was for the game to be a buggy, unfinished Early Access product that you would regret buying. It’s really important to us that Astroneer’s aerospace exploration sandbox is represented early on. The extra time to develop, test, and polish will help us to ensure that we can deliver to you exactly what we want in the time that it will need.

GAME DEVELOPERS CONFERENCE 2016

Something else that we’re really excited to announce is that we’ll be taking Astroneer with us to the Game Developers Conference this year! This will be the first time people outside of our team and friends will be able to get their hands on the game and we can’t wait to share it.

-the team @ System Era

Astroneer will be available on Steam Early Access this year for Windows and Mac OS.

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