Budget Cuts has been delayed again. No new release date set

Yesterday Budget Cuts was supposed to have released on Steam after a two week delay but once again Neat Corporation has decided to hold off.

The two week extension to sort the game out has not been long enough to get the game into a releasable state and so the 31 May launch date was thrown out the window. An explanation for this latest delay is as follows:

Long story short – we were pretty late in properly optimizing Budget Cuts, thinking we wouldn’t need as much time as we actually did. The optimizations we implemented in this final stretch, while useful, ended up not helping as much as we had hoped. We thought our initial delay of two weeks would be enough, but even throughout these last few days, working into the night and firing on all cylinders to get performance up, we’re still not hitting an acceptable and consistent framerate. We were too optimistic, and we’re very sorry about that 🙁

We’ve worked hard on this game for such a long time now, we’re so very excited to finally get it into your hands! However, we’d hate to have all it diminished by a laggy experience, especially the ones we could fix with just a little bit more time. I hope this is all understandable. We’re just as disappointed about delays and framerate issues as you are.

We have been looking forward to this release with so much excitement, and it feels really bad to subject you to another wait, especially this close to our previous launch date. However, we believe you all deserve a performant game, that will let you experience it the way it was meant to be played, even if that means you’ll get it slightly later.

There are numerous technical obstacles to overcome such as progression blocking bugs, audio performance, occlusion culling,  and framerate drops.

Frustratingly, the team has no idea when the game will be released now adding, “we don’t know, but it’s going to be as soon as the game is as performant and stable as it should be”. The Steam page now has the release date down as June but it sounds like it may take while longer to fix things up for launch.