Since our reveal in February’s State of Play, the team has been hard at work on Sifu. We were hoping to release the game by the end of 2021, but we now realize that in order to release a polished game, this won’t be possible before 2022.

The Covid crisis and the subsequent lockdowns have been a huge challenge for everyone, and although we were lucky enough not to face the important revenue losses that many businesses have gone through, the situation did create some real challenges for us. Since March 2020 we have had to adapt to changing regulations, switching the whole team to remote working while we continued our development work, and we lost some velocity as a consequence – remote working has its advantages, but losing daily informal interactions between team members can also be hard to manage.

We still felt earlier this year that we could make our original planned launch date, but as the deadline grew closer, it became clear that we wouldn’t be able to do so without putting the quality of the game at risk or creating huge pressure on the Sloclap team – and neither of these options were acceptable to us.

We’re very sorry about this delay – as gamers ourselves, we know how frustrating this can be, and as an independent studio, working multiple years on a single project, delaying a game can also create financial risks, so it’s certainly not a decision that we took lightly. But at the end of the day, our top priority is to make the best possible game, a hugely entertaining and polished experience, and we’d rather ask our fans to wait a little longer than planned than release something we’re not totally proud of.

Sorry again for this delay – we are now very confident that we can release in the very first months of 2022, and we will announce a precise date as soon as possible! We hope you enjoyed what we’ve shown so far. Thank you for your patience!

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