Development Blog: Jan 16th 2019

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We submitted Honor and Duty: D-Day into final QA last week for the NA store but couldn’t submit to the EU store. During the submission process, we found out that the IARC rating was still not available for the EU. This has been available since August for the NA store and was supposed to follow for the EU a few months afterwards so we were not expecting it to still not be ready in January.

For those unfamiliar with it, the IARC rating is a new rating system for digital only games and is a huge improvement over the old way where you needed an ESRB rating for NA and a PEGI rating for the EU. The ESRB process was very simple and they offered a free rating process that was quick and easy while PEGI was costly and time consuming. The PEGI rating was around $300 USD for games under 450M and around $1200 USD for games over that and it could take 10 working days to complete. There were also some countries in the EU which required a rating other than PEGI so releasing on the EU store required ratings that were horribly outdated for digital releases.

The new IARC rating is now used on the Xbox and Nintendo platforms and is in use by Sony in the NA territory. The IARC rating process is free and takes only a few minutes to complete. This is a huge improvement as it means that releasing in the EU requires no more additional work or cost on the ratings side. Unfortunately Sony’s EU division hasn’t implemented it and can’t give an answer on when it will be ready.

At this point our only options are to sit and wait or to go through the PEGI process. Since Sony can’t give us any estimate on when it will be ready, we’ve opted to go through the PEGI rating and should have that in process by tomorrow. Sony found a handful of minor issues with D-Day during it’s first QA run and we’ll be fixing those and resubmitting this week. By the time the PEGI rating is ready (approx 10 days), we should have a build ready for the EU that should pass on it’s first run.

With the process time of the rating followed by the time for QA and store prep, February 12th will be the earliest day D-Day could release. We’re waiting for our rep to let us know what’s on the schedule around that time so we can decide on a definitive date. We will be doing another beta round to test out the tanks so everyone will get a chance to play again soon. Since we have a little more time than expected, we will have more time for some extra features so although we wanted to get it out this month, it’s nice to be able to put a few other things in as well.

After D-Day releases, we’ll pick back up on development of RC Airplane challenge which is almost ready for VR consult. The SP expansion for D-Day is starting this week and the remaster of Honor and Duty: Arcade Edition is also beginning. We also have some new game ideas we’ll be sharing soon that we’re excited about.