SkateBIRD Is No Longer Landing On Switch In 2020, Gets Pushed To Next Year
Kickflip tailslide to 2021
by Gavin Lane
After featuring in last December's Indie World Showcase with a projected release date of 'late 2020', SkateBIRD's developer Glass Bottom Games has announced that the game will be delayed until 2021. A Kickstarter success back in June last year, it features a bunch of skateboarding fowl pulling heelflips and grinding around Tony Hawk-style in skatepark levels, but you won't be playing it this year.
The news came via the game's Kickstarter page. Given the current state of the world, it's easy to imagine the dev team struggling with financial pressures and other worries. Thankfully, that doesn't seem to be the case according to creator Megan Fox (not that one). Writing in a Kickstarter update, she reassures backers about the status of the game and the team:
We're not financially imperiled (unlike a lot of my friends in the service industry, yikes - please help where you can, tip well if you're getting delivery, etc). We're fine, really. Between the Kickstarter and some platform deals, we're more than funded through launch. However. The game is taking longer than planned due to normal iteration stuff. For instance, we're gonna go for a story mode! Like an ACTUAL story mode, not the findable tapes side-story we'd originally planned. Then pile on there that at least my productivity has halved or more because of - you know, everything outside right now? - and it's best to kick the can down the road.
The delay may come as a disappointment to anyone who watched the trailer and got excited, but it seems that it will benefit from more care and attention afforded by this extra time. Fox details other positives, including having more hands on deck behind the scenes to help give the game an extra layer of polish.
We certainly liked the look of SkateBIRD from its debut trailer (see below). It's been a while since the Hawk himself has put out a decent skateboard game (although he has remasters coming out soon on other platforms), so hopefully his avian counterparts can bring the goods to Switch, despite the delay.
Looking forward to this in 2021? Feel free to swoop down and leave a little present in the box below.
[source kickstarter.com]