DayZ creator Dean Hall has pushed the 64-kilometre open-world survival Icarus back by a month on consoles, then made his point bluntly: delays aren’t scandals, they’re the messy reality of development, and the industry needs to stop worshipping dates.
No one enjoys delays, especially when they hit a game people have been waiting on. But in the games business, postponements aren’t an exception – they’re routine, often because shareholder-friendly timelines collide with what production can actually deliver. The result is predictable: frustration, suspicion, and a louder backlash every time a project slips again.
Hall’s response wasn’t soft. He’s arguing that a delay should not be treated as a mark of shame, but as the consequence of choosing the safer option over shipping something half-baked. The flashpoint is Icarus. The game launched on PC back in 2021 and has kept evolving through ongoing updates. In 2026, the studio announced a console release for February 26, then barely three weeks later confirmed the launch would move to March 26 – the same day of the month – so the team can polish the experience and avoid a rough debut.
After the shift, Hall jumped into a Q&A on Reddit, where delays quickly became a main topic, driven in part by players furious about a one-month slip. He pointed to multiple RocketWerkz projects that have taken extra time for the same reasons: quality first, and less pressure on the people building the thing. For Hall, the real disease is the fixation on specific dates, because money sits behind every calendar decision. “Games cost a lot of money, and when you launch has a huge impact on the cost” – he said – describing a target obsession that can end up hurting the product. In his view, the way audiences react to delays helps shape decisions upstream: if every slip is treated like disaster, the system rewards bad calls.
If A Game Doesn’t Slip, Crunch Often Is The Hidden Price
Hall also tied the “no delays” bragging rights directly to crunch culture. It’s rare these days for a game to never move at all, but some AAA releases still hit their targets, and he argues that isn’t always a virtue. Sometimes it’s simply the consequence of grinding teams down to make the calendar happy. That’s why he urged players to say openly that they can live with delays, and to carry that message to the industry’s biggest gatekeepers, calling out Xbox and PlayStation by name, so pushing a date back isn’t automatically treated as failure.
He closed with advice that’s uncomfortable but direct: don’t pre-order games. At the same time, he acknowledged the business reality that pre-orders still matter, because they help projects win attention from major platforms.
Source: 3DJuegos
