13 years after it was first teased, and 2 months after committing to a 2025 release, Mewgenics is delayed into 2026

The "endless cat breeding RPG" Mewgenics showed up at the PC Gaming Show yesterday with another bizarre trailer and a new release date: Instead of arriving in 2025 as planned, it's now set to arrive on February 10, 2026. And there's actually a pretty good reason for the delay.

"Dude, listen. Launching in Nov–Dec is hard," Mewgenics mastermind Edmund McMillen explained on Steam. "We want this game to get the attention it deserves and don’t want to compete with holidays and holiday AAA releases. And honestly, adding a few more months to dev means launching with an even more heavily tested and polished experience!"

That seems entirely reasonable to me. The holiday quarter—sometimes referred to by retailers as "the golden quarter"—can be incredibly lucrative, but it's also absolutely overrun by developers and publishers looking to cash in on the spirit of the season.

That's not so much an issue with videogames, though, which are free from the shackles of in-store inventory and parking lot chaos: The advent of digital distribution, particularly on PC, means games, and especially indie games, can become huge hits at any time. Balatro dropped in February 2024, for instance, and did pretty well for itself, and Dave the Diver made a big splash when it showed up in June 2023. These days, picking your spot is often more important than being part of the usual seasonal rush.

And it may not be just a matter of dodging the festive crowds, because it sounds like there's still a fair chunk of work to do before Mewgenics is ready to roll—although the new release date gives the team a solid eight months to get everything done. McMillen provided a list of the development work remaining:

The final boss is drawn and half animated—he/she/it will hopefully be implemented by the end of the month!We’ve started adding hard path rewards and random gen items for said rewards (this is very cool stuff!).Lots of new cutscenes were added! We have 4 large cutscenes and 6 small cutscenes to go!We went ahead and had Ridiculon add 3 more tracks to the game for some extra late-game spice!Next week we start to implement alt/shiny furniture! (This is also very cool!)Big secret late-game system has been fully implemented!

"We know you wanna play, we want you to play!" McMillen wrote. "And starting at some point in Jan we’ll start doing live streams, or something? I dunno the details yet but I'm sure it’ll happen soon! Also more hands-on previews are in the works! And maybe even more trailers?! Who knows?!"

Hopefully McMillen does. I guess we'll wait to see what happens in February.