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Mighty No. 9 Delayed After ‘No More Delays’ Promise

By Daniel George

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Mighty No. 9 might not be out before its anime will, at this point.

Imagine if you were someone who told a large amount of people that they will be able to try out a specific product of yours on a specific date. Fans have been clamoring for a version of this style of product from this person for a long time, and since they were finally given an exact date as opposed to a delayed release window, expectations are to follow through on that exact release date. Unfortunately, despite massive evidence to your inability to properly manage a product in a timely manner, a fair number of people will still expect you to keep your word, and will be devastated if you damaged their faith in you once again.

The person you were imagining was Keiji Inafune, and the product, Mighty No. 9, was the game that was given the specific release date of February 9th. Just over two weeks before the game was supposed to be released, Inafune updated his Kickstarter backers, informing them that Mighty No. 9 would not come out when he said it would, but instead pushed it back to “Spring 2016.”

A definitive release date could not be provided due to the nature of the problem behind the delay; bugs inside the game’s network modes.

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“There are two large reasons for this problem,” Inafune explained, “One of them being the large number of platforms supported (the solution for each platform is slightly different) and the other stems from the fact that the engine we are using is no longer being updated which means adjustments for matchmaking and online code are being made manually (actually reprogramming parts of the engine by the dev team themselves). Unfortunately, this is all a result of miscalculations on the part of us, the development staff.

“As a result, our fans who have been looking forward to Mighty No. 9 have been forced to wait for over half a year longer than expected, and for that we are sincerely sorry. I want to take this chance to apologize personally, and on the behalf of the development staff.”

As tough as it is to see problems from matchmaking over multiple game platforms arise, there are still many disappointing factors involved. First and foremost, Inafune already gave his word Mighty No. 9 wouldn’t be delayed again. You have to be absolutely certain before making definitive statements like that, otherwise you look as silly as you are right now.

Second, the problems surround a small part of the non-campaign gameplay, which certainly isn’t the main focus that fans would be most concerned about. Patching the problems at a post-release time would let fans who backed Comcept with their hard-earned dollar actually play with Mighty No. 9 before the game is delayed an extra year on top.

Thirdly, having the bugs be a problem due to the amount of platforms involved is because you, Inafune, incentivized extra donations after you were already funded for Mighty No. 9 in full. By allowing people to give you more money to support more platforms, you are giving the inherent promise that you would be able to develop for the platform.

Regardless of the frustrations surrounding the delay, it will be interesting to see how backer and public perception surrounding Mighty No. 9 is affected. When a major Kickstarter project can’t get a working product out the door for years on end, it hurts the credibility of the little guy who needs the money to achieve their dream of making a video game that can’t get published by Deep Silver, like Comcept has.

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