Subliminal Status Update 12/22/24

Hello everyone!

As mentioned in the public announcement, we had a series of miscommunications that led to Accidental Studios announcing a build release when there was not meant to be one. As Patreon supporters, we figured that you deserve a more fleshed out explanation of what happened, and how we will ensure something like this does not happen again moving forward. 

Starting with the Pre-Release Trailer we uploaded in August, we used jingle bells at the end of the video, which was meant to signify an early release build this Christmas. Marketers in our team were misinformed, and assumed this to be a full release when the development team intended on a partial release.

Furthermore, our publishers are based in Asia, and do the majority of their marketing for Asian countries. We have been told that jingle bells don’t necessarily signify Christmas in Asia, so our publishers assumed this was less of a release announcement and more of a teaser to the general timeframe Subliminal would release.

Limited communication between our marketing team and the publishers for a prolonged amount of time only increased confusion. Since the start of last week, we have been in complete contact with the publishers, and the mistake is now fully understood.

We are used to working on tighter deadlines, as in the past we have been able to finish a build, debug it, and upload it onto Patreon within a couple of days. This timeline obviously changes with publishers, and with global releases like a Steam Early Access build would be. Subliminal’s “prologue” finished development just last week, and entered the debugging phase. Given the proximity of this to Christmas, and the fact that the publishers only received the development build last week, they would not have had enough time to do localization (translations/subtitling) or international marketing due to the such short notice they had been given. Additionally, we only had a buggy development build to share with them at the time, as debugging was actively taking place.

Due to this series of miscommunications, we had to make the decision to withhold the “prologue” release until a later time. We have learned from our mistakes, so we do not want to specify a release time until we are 100% sure that we can make it happen. Our marketing team will also be working in unison with the publishers from now on, so that mistakes like this do not happen externally. Internally, we are working to re-organize the chain-of-command in our team, ensuring that nothing gets released publicly without being reliable and accurate.

This being said, our current plan is to have a solid Early Access release prepared for the next Steam Next Fest. This is just an estimate, and is not 100% certain, but in an effort to keep everyone in the loop, we thought it was important to look forward. We will be sure to let you know if anything changes, and if Subliminal’s prologue will in fact be ready for release during Steam Next Fest. Additionally, we will start doing weekly development updates on our prologue, including exclusive development videos and screenshots!

As always, we appreciate your patience as we work through this together. This is our first time developing a game, running a business, and working with other companies to create projects on such a large scale, so there has been quite a steep learning curve!

Cheers,

Accidental Studios