State of Decay Release “Almost” Here

In a new blog post on the official Undead Labs website, we learn that the rumored June 5th release date for State of Decay isn’t likely going to be realized, though the game is “almost” ready and is going through Microsoft’s final certification process on the Xbox 360.

As everyone on the planet seems to know at this point, our target release date of June 5 was leaked by a GameStop employee a few weeks ago. I’m not sure why they had that date in their system, but it’s a date we’ve been shooting for internally, so it’s unlikely someone just made it up and got lucky. In any case, despite our best efforts to clarify it’s not an official release date, word spread, got picked up and repeated by the Big Guys (I’m looking at you, IGN!), and quickly became fact.

A quick peek at #stateofdecay confirms it, as about 20% of the tweets are something along the lines of (State of Decay is out June 5th!). Another 20% are (So excited to play State of Decay!), and the remaining 60% are (Wanna play State of Decay now? Try the Leaked version here: [bullshit phishing URL redacted] . I’ve been playing it a week now.)

[Hint: No, he hasn’t.]

When we know the official release date, you’ll see something like this on the front page of our website:

OMFG THE OFFICIAL RELEASE DATE OF STATE OF DECAY IS XXXX!

I can tell you this: we don’t know the release date, and neither does anyone at Microsoft. But we do know the release process, and we can make some informed guesses about what that means for the release date. There’s no reason you shouldn’t know as much as we do there are no conspiracies or big corporate secrets here so I’m going to tell you what we know about how all this works.

Every game released on the Xbox 360 must comply with a series of Technical Certification Requirements, or TCRs. These requirements have nothing to do with the actual game whether it’s fun to play, whether the art is beautiful, the music compelling, or the mechanics well balanced and interesting. Instead, they specify requirements for how games interact with the Xbox hardware and software. For example, there are TCRs stipulating how a game must handle a controller being disconnected, or what to do if the player logs out, or if the storage device becomes unavailable. There are TCRs that stipulate the maximum amount of time you can be in a loading screen without showing something interactive or entertaining (e.g. hints, videos, etc). There are TCRs mandating minimum framerate, and stipulating text must be legible on standard definition televisions. There are TCRs that stipulate proper terminology and spelling for the Xbox controller buttons (e.g. Start, LB, RT). In short, TCRs ensure a baseline level of quality and a consistent way of handling events.