Developer Unknown Worlds has announced their underwater survival crafting game Subnautica is going to release on PS4 this holiday. The indie developer is working together with Panic Button for both the PS4 port and speeding up the development of the Xbox One version of Subnautica. Check out the announcement trailer.
Subnautica is finally arriving on the Playstation 4 this holiday season, after being available for the Xbox One since May 2016 and PC since 2014. This may seem an oddly long time-span between platform releases but Microsoft ‘s Xbox Game Preview program opened up the doors for unfinished games still in development to become available on their console. A very similar system to Steam Early Access which is already a commonplace method of releasing games on the PC.
Since Sony has not yet announced any similar Early Access-type program for their console, owners of the PS4 have been deprived of many in-development games, just like Subnautica. Now, that indie developer Unknown Worlds has fully released Subnautica on the PC earlier this year, the team has set their sights on new shores. Namely, the Playstation 4.
Without giving a specific release date however, we are left with a broad Holiday 2018 release date. Interestingly enough though, the studio has decided to work together with Panic Button to port their hit game not only to the PS4 but also “accelerate Xbox One development”. On their website, the developer candidly admits that bringing their game to Xbox One has not been an easy task and that they have failed to update the Xbox One version as fast as they had liked.
“Moving a game from PC to Xbox is a difficult process. Subnautica is a big, complex piece of software. Lots of nuanced interactions with the host hardware need to be unpicked and rebuilt. Performance is a huge challenge, as we are bound by the Xbox’s fixed computing resources.
We were not moving fast enough, so we decided to shake things up and bring in outside help. We’ve partnered with Panic Button Games to finish Subnautica on Xbox One. Panic Button know consoles inside out. They have lots of experience bringing big games to consoles, and they are also helping us bring Subnautica to PS4.”
It makes sense that the small team is partnering up with Panic Button who have proven their worth with capable ports to consoles like Doom and Wolfenstein II for the Nintendo Switch most prominently.
