As the holiday season wrapped up, Stronghold: Warlords developer Firefly Studios faced a difficult decision: launch day was rapidly approaching, and the RTS game's multiplayer mode still wasn't performing the way it ought to. One option was to launch the single-player campaign on the scheduled release date, with the multiplayer mode to be added later.
"We were really, really considering that because we could have just released single-player, and that would have been a perfectly viable option in terms of what was actually ready at the time," marketing director Nick Tannahill says. Other games have taken this approach recently: Iron Harvest added ranked multiplayer a few weeks after launch, but saw a wave of unfavourable Steam reviews over what users saw as 'missing features' thanks to that decision.
When Firefly looked at its options, there were no hard contractual obligations that required Stronghold: Warlords to launch on the announced release date, and so the studio's leadership decided the better option was to delay launch - six weeks for the development team time to iron out the issues with multiplayer and ship the game as a complete package.
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