Gun Media’s Wes Keltner On When To Expect A Friday The 13th Release Date

If you’re a diehard horror fan or one of the over 12,000 Kickstarter backers of Friday The 13th: The Game, you’re probably curious as to when you can expect to see the game hit the shelves. You’ve probably seen plenty of gameplay footage of Jason hacking and slashing his way through teenagers at Camp Crystal Lake courtesy of their beta, and a quick google search will tell you that the game is slated for an “early 2017” release. But when exactly in early 2017 can we expect the game? Wes Keltner of Gun Media, the publisher of Friday The 13th, took to the game’s official forum to elaborate on the game’s release date:

“The only reason you haven’t seen a release date is because we have to pass console certification. Let me explain what that means. Once we have a candidate (feature and content complete) we have to send a build to Sony and Microsoft. Their internal teams test the game against a very intense checklist to make sure we pass. We have some details on how this process is “graded” but we don’t have everything they check against. Additionally, each territory has different guidelines. Let’s just look at Sony. There’s SCEA, SCEE, SCEJ and Sony Asia. Each of these territories has a different rule book and we don’t have access to all of these. So, to a certain degree, we go at this a little blind. What passes in North America, may not pass in Japan for example.

There are several “levels” to passing certification. The first level is pretty basic; Does it boot and can you start a game? While other levels are far, far more intricate. For example; MS still requires that we support Kinect, yet they no longer sell/bundle this device for XB1. You, as the player, still need to be able to say “Xbox Record That.” You also need to be able to hot swap between apps, while the game is still running in the background. These console features actually use one of the CPU cores, thus taking one of those away from us, the developer. It’s like building a car, only to figure out that the Engine is a V8, but you can only use 7 of the cylinders. Bummer.