After a lengthy wait, the full version of Serment is finally ready to be released!
Unfortunately, the Steam's Winter Sale is coming very soon. Clashing the initial release window with such a big sale is very worrying, thus, following our publisher's recommendations, the game will be set to release on February 1, 2019.
There are a few problems from a commercial perspective with releasing a game near a big sale, and I'll try to elaborate a bit more on this matter so you can understand our reasoning for choosing such a release date (Fortunately, no major gameplay bugs or related issues this time, so expect no more delays after this).
Firstly, each game on Steam has a small window shortly after release, where it publicly appears in several places on the Steam client, notably the "New releases" list. This largely serves as an initial visibility crutch for a new game, and there's a snowball effect where more popular games will subsequently appear in other places such as the "New and Trending" list, the main store's banners or Steam's recommendations while less popular games will quickly fade into obscurity.
During major sales like the Summer of Winter Sale, this initial visibility is severely reduced to make space on the Steam client for featured discounts. So releasing a game during the sale is very undesirable.
Then, why not release the game before the sale instead (for instances, right now)? Due to Steam's compulsory review before release (which takes more time than we expected due to the recent changes in Steam's policy about games with mature contents), the earliest possible release date would be next Monday, December 17.
The Winter Sale will start shortly after, so the game's spot in the "Specials" list due to its sale discount (which is also a very significant amount of a new game's visibility) will be quickly swallowed up by thousands of other featured deals. Thus, releasing right before the sale is also a no-go.
But then, why wait a whole month after the Winter Sale? Why don't we release the game right after it ends?
Past data from our publisher suggests that right after a big sale, the number of store views and purchases immediately plummets, and remains a lot worse than other normal periods for a solid 3 to 4 weeks. We speculate this is due to potential customers being occupied with their recent purchases during the sale, so they're not immediately looking to buy any additional products.
Thus, our publisher recommends a 4 weeks gap after the Winter Sale before Serment's release, which leads us to the date of February 1.
The timing is rather unfortunate, so we apologize and hope for your understanding.