How Worried Should We Be By Mighty No. 9’s Rumored Delay?

[dropcap size=big]B[/dropcap]ack in April, the release date for Mighty No. 9 was pushed back (from “Spring 2015”) to September. Even so, it was great to finally have a concrete date in mind and fans eagerly anticipated the September 15 launch. More recently, websites such as Amazon and GameStop removed that September release date and placed a very obviously pending date of “December 31, 2016.” If you’ve shopped for games online before then you know this is just a placeholder date which goes up when a real date isn’t known. But wasn’t there a date? Yes — and that’s what makes this whole mess notable.

GameStop provided an official (if general) statement to Game Informer today which helps explain the situation which they relayed as the following:

Notification of delays such as this one are initiated by the publisher. This includes placeholder dates that are put in place when a game is first listed or, in this case, delayed.

When you tie this comment in with Mighty No. 9, it thoroughly sounds like Deep Silver/Comcept are the ones who moved the date from a known quantity to unknown. Of course, every so often these date changes are incorrect. For example, a few years ago GameStop spurred rumors that The Last Guardian was canceled when gamers with pre-orders were auto-dialed with this false news. With that said though, it’s a very interesting situation made more interesting by the fact that Comcept has not outright denied what’s going on.

That, despite the fact that this news of a potential delay is a week old at this point. In my opinion, when something is false, you want to get out there and confirm that it is untrue rather than letting the rumor fester and eat into a company/product’s goodwill. Of course, keeping quiet may totally be a matter of legality, but it never tends to look good in situations such as these. Mighty No. 9 isn’t just any old bargain bin release. It’s poised to be a very important release that many gamers have their eyes on.

Not only do players want to know whether Mighty No. 9 is any good, but they also want to see how Keiji Inafune and company are handling themselves post-Capcom. Will their production be so stunning that folks will kick themselves for not backing RED ASH when they had the chance? Or will it prove that launching that campaign when they did was actually an awful idea? If Mighty No. 9 is delayed, then it’ll definitely make the timing more suspect. After all, it’ll frame that second Kickstarter as launching despite an apparently tumultuous period of Mighty No. 9 development/finalization.

With the information we have at the moment, I believe that Mighty No. 9 will launch digitally on September 15 but those upcoming physical releases will be delayed. After all, that’s what those online store listings are for. This could also easily explain why retailers have removed dates while Steam still proudly promotes the September date. Or, both could be delayed. We simply don’t know for certain until Comcept and/or Deep Silver provide an explicit answer. Now that the bigger gaming sites have caught on my fingers are crossed to see official word make its way out soon.