Gigantic Might Finally Launch This Month

Indie developer Motiga first began beta testing Gigantic, its colorful and cartoonish MOBA, in August 2015, but nearly two years later the game still hasn’t gotten a final release. As of today, however, it finally has a release month, at least.

Writing on the game’s website today, Motiga Executive Producer Phil Frazier revealed that Gigantic is “currently going through the preliminary certification process in preparation for a proper release in June.” Certification is a series of steps all platform holders put game developers through in the final days and weeks before their game launches, so entering certification means that Gigantic is content complete at this point and is just now going through some final tweaks.

“We’ve been crushing bugs and adding polish items to the game for the last several weeks, and are now working towards submitting it to the final certification process with Microsoft in early June,” explained Frazier.

Once Gigantic is able to pass that final certification it will be ready to launch on Xbox One and Windows 10 PCs. Not all games successfully pass through certification on their first attempt, however, and failing to do so means a developer has to make further adjustments to its game, submit it again and hope it passes that time around. So Gigantic should launch this month…if it passes Microsoft certification.

The journey to this point has not exactly been a smooth one for Motiga. Microsoft signed on as the game’s original publisher and heavily promoted it at events, but the console holder eventually pulled out of the deal. Motiga has been forced to undergo multiple rounds of layoffs since then, with the most recent believed to have been in March. In March 2016, Motiga was able to secure a new publisher in Perfect World Entertainment, which decided to release the game for all PCs running at least Windows 7.

When Motiga and Perfect World finally do launch Gigantic, Frazier is hoping new players will be able to grasp its mechanics, which apparently has not been the case for many beta players. One of the biggest player complaints Motiga wanted to address was that the game was “hard” to play. “We realized we needed to do a better job of explaining many of the mechanics that exist in the game,” wrote Frazier “and have developed a system to walk players through this in a logical way.”

Motiga’s work won’t end on launch day, either. The studio has already planned out a significant chunk of post-launch content, which will be released at intervals of four weeks and contain things like new heroes, skins, and creatures.

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