Why Kingmakers was delayed
Kingmakers was set to enter Early Access on October 8, 2025. Five days before, Redemption Road posted a letter on Steam calling it off. Its reasons come down to two things: the studio would not cut features to make the date, and it wanted the game to hold a true 60 frames per second on mid-range PCs without what it called fake frames.
The letter, as posted
It went up on Steam as a single image, so here it is in full as text, paragraph by paragraph. The notes in orange point to where each part is explained below.
“After much contemplation, we realize that the scheduled Kingmakers launch on October 8 will no longer be possible. We want to apologize to all of the fans who are eagerly anticipating this game. We are sorry for letting you down.”
Reason one: nothing cut“Why is Kingmakers being delayed? In short: it’s an incredibly ambitious, uncompromising game, and we don’t want to cut any planned features, for the sake of getting it out the door earlier. Our goal, from the start, has been to create something that’s nothing like anything else on the market, in terms of gameplay, scale, scope, and interactivity.”
Reason two: frame rate“With Kingmakers, we set out to push the Unreal Engine 4 codebase to its absolute limits, while still providing true 60fps to midrange PCs, without the need for fake frames. We are an 80% engineering team, who got into this business to push technological barriers.”
The scale“We currently have tens of thousands of soldiers, each with AI and pathfinding that rivals what you’d expect from a AAA third person shooter. When you walk away from a battle, it continues to play out. Nothing is faked. We have giant 6 story castles where every room can be entered and every wall, floor, and ceiling destroyed. When you build a Lumbermill, it’s a real place that can be entered, or, in an enemy invasion, turned into a combat arena.”
“When you drive a car into a tree, you’re ejected through the windshield, the tree breaks from its stump, and then rolls over whatever hapless soldiers are along its path. Every mission takes place in a massive map that each player on the server is free to explore - with or without their own personal army of thousands.”
Reason one, continued“We set out to do all of this, with full drop-in/drop-out 4 player multiplayer support, and we have. We just need a bit more time on content polish before we feel good about charging money for it.”
“So that is what we are doing now. We’re making sure everyone who buys the game is enthralled and feels like their money was well spent. We want this to be the case whether you have a top-of-the line rig or a PC that’s seen better days.”
“Thank you so much for all of your love and support. We hope we are doing everything we can to earn it.”
What arrived instead“We will be presenting a half hour long deepdive on Kingmakers gameplay very soon, with a comprehensive overview of everything we’ve been working on.”
Reason one: nothing cut to hit the date
The letter’s first answer is about scope. The studio says it would rather miss the date than cut planned features, and that the drop-in, drop-out four-player multiplayer already worked. What was missing, in its words, was polish on the content before charging money for it. How the co-op is meant to work is on Kingmakers co-op and multiplayer.
Reason two: real frame rate on a mid-range PC
“Fake frames” is a common nickname for frame generation, the graphics feature that inserts computed frames between rendered ones. Read that way, the target is 60 rendered frames a second on a mid-range PC. What the store pages currently list for hardware is on Kingmakers system requirements, and what the director has said since about stutter and stability is on Kingmakers performance.
The scale they said they were holding to
The middle of the letter is a list of what the performance work has to carry: tens of thousands of soldiers that keep fighting when you walk away, castles that can be taken apart room by room, and maps big enough for each player to roam with an army of their own. The same claims, shown on screen a year later, are laid out on Kingmakers gameplay explained.
Said afterwards, by others
tinyBuild is a listed company, and it put the delay in a regulatory announcement the following Monday, in the same terms as the letter.
“The team needs more time to polish content and optimise performance, so even a mid-range PC can achieve true 60fps without the need for fake frames.”
tinyBuild, Inc. From tinyBuild, Inc regulatory announcement: Pipeline Update
Asked whether the game had simply been unfinished, he said a build existed for the date; features were what fell short.
“We had a release candidate on that date, but it didn’t have a lot of features that we wanted in the game(though it did have everything that is depicted in trailers and more).”
Paul Fisch, game director. From Paul Fisch on dates and the release candidate, Steam discussions
Was it the engine?
No. The official FAQ once said the game was being made in Unreal Engine 5. When that line came up on the Steam forum, the director said the game had always been on Unreal Engine 4, that porting had been tried and dropped over performance, and that the delays had nothing to do with it.
“None of the delays are caused by switching engines.”
The full engine story, including where the Unreal Engine 5 idea came from, is on the Kingmakers developer page.
What the letter promised next, and what arrived
Its last line promised a half-hour gameplay deep dive “very soon”. The deep dive arrived nearly a year later and runs a little over twelve minutes, released together with the Steam playtest sign-up. What it covers is broken down on Kingmakers gameplay explained, and whether the long gap meant the game was in trouble is on what happened to Kingmakers.