Steam Early Access Release Update
I would have much preferred to post a “Guilds of Mountgate is now live on Steam!” announcement by now, but unfortunately we’re still not quite there.
Originally, I was aiming to release Guilds of Mountgate into Steam Early Access on August 11. Unfortunately, the review process and communication with Valve turned out to be considerably more complicated than expected, with some delays and misunderstandings along the way.
After it became clear that the original release date couldn’t be met, Steam eventually displayed August 31 as the release date. This wasn’t a newly planned release date on my end, but rather the date Steam displayed after August had been selected as the intended release month.
I was still very hopeful that the review would be completed in time to make that date — unfortunately, that didn’t happen either.
The build was submitted again for review on August 26, and as of September 1 we’ve now reached roughly the upper end of Steam’s usual review timeframe once the weekend is excluded.
As always: At this point, there isn’t anything left on my side currently preventing the release. The game is ready for its Early Access launch, and I’m essentially waiting for the final approval from Valve.
Of course, I haven’t spent the additional waiting time doing nothing. Quite the opposite.
The extra development time has already gone into fixing several bugs, improving quality of life, and — probably most importantly — substantially reworking parts of the backend architecture in preparation for a larger number of concurrent players.
That work has made state requests considerably more lightweight, improved server stability and added additional safeguards against sudden load spikes. I even discovered afterwards that the server CPU wasn’t boosting properly, so fixing that gave GoM some additional free performance on top of the architectural improvements.
So while I’m obviously not happy about the delay itself, there is at least one very real upside: the version that eventually launches on Steam will be noticeably more stable and polished than the version I would have released a few weeks ago.
I also want to apologize to everyone who was expecting the game to become available by the end of August. I deliberately tried to avoid promising another exact release date after August 11 because the remaining part of the process was no longer entirely in my hands, but I know that seeing August 31 on Steam naturally created that expectation.
For now, there isn’t much more I can do besides continue development and wait for the review to be completed. Once Valve gives the final approval, I intend to get Guilds of Mountgate onto Steam as quickly as possible.
Thank you for your patience — and especially to everyone in the community who has continued playing, testing, reporting issues and helping me improve the game throughout all of this. :)
Hopefully the next release update I write will finally be the one saying: We’re live.