Marvelous Entertainment and Honey Parade Games’ UPPERS is supposed to come out on PlayStation 4 and on Steam for PC. It was supposed to be out at the end of 2018, during the winter. Marvelous had announced that the game was coming to the West for PS4 and PC back in August of 2018. However, the game slipped out of its late 2018 release window and into an early 2019 release window, but even that didn’t stick for long and now it’s been pushed back even further into the year.
Over on the SteamDB entry, UPPERS was updated back on February 24th, 2019 and the release date for March 1st, 2019 was removed. This came after the March 1st, 2019 release date was added to the database back on February 22nd, 2019, just two days prior.
This sent panic through the Steam community, who made posts asking about the release date in a thread where the developer mentioned that the game was originally scheduled to release Q4, 2018. Doom and gloom began to set in and gamers assumed that UPPERS was likely cancelled.
Well, there was still some hope given to the community by none other than the game’s publisher, Marvelous Entertainment. They made a tweet in response to a concerned gamer asking about the status of UPPERS, and they informed him on March 6th, 2019 that the game was still in development for the PS4 and PC.
Afraid not; but it is currently in development for the PlayStation 4 and Windows PC.
Once we have news to share we will be sure to share it.
— Marvelous Games (@marvelous_games) March 6, 2019
Now what we don’t know is if the game is in actual development, or if that’s just to placate gamers while Valve reviews the game.
As some of you may know, Valve has been selectively banning anime games and visual novels, mostly from indie Japanese and Chinese developers. It’s unlikely that they would ban a game like UPPERS from such a well known mid-tier developer like Marvelous, but at this point there’s really no telling what Valve might do. There’s also the issue of Sony who has also been forcing developers to censor games on the PS4. If Marvelous ran into any problems it would likely be with Sony before Valve.
However, it could be exactly what Marvelous mentioned, and that the game is just in development and moving a little slowly toward its release. But with just days left before winter ends, it’s unlikely going to make the Q1 2019 release window unless it launches within the next two weeks. Why the delay? We still don’t know, but thankfully it’s still in development… for now.
(Thanks for the news tip TheSwordUser)