Century: Age of Ashes is delayed so it doesn't get murdered by Battlefield 2042

Typically, videogames are delayed because they've gone over schedule and need additional time. Sometimes there are specific reasons, like the sudden, last-minute appearance of a particularly bad bug, but more often it's simply a matter of the game not being where the developers want it to be in order to hand it over to the public.

In a way, I suppose that's also the case of Century: Age of Ashes, the upcoming "multiplayer dragon battle game" that was announced last year. It is definitely not where developer Playwing LTD wants it to be—not in a technical sense, though, but in a temporal one.

"Last week we learned that one of the most anticipated games of the year postponed its launch to one day after our planned release date," the studio wrote. "As a consequence, we have decided to postpone the launch of Century: Age of Ashes to December 2, 2021, to give it space."

The anticipated game in question is Battlefield 2042, which EA pushed last week from its scheduled release on October 22 to November 19, because of "unforeseen challenges" arising from the Covid-19 pandemic. Century: Age of Ashes had been set to go live on November 18 (at this point, the Steam page still lists that as the go date), which very suddenly became not-great timing for an interesting but not very well known game trying to make a splash during the busiest season of the year.

It's unusual for a developer to flat-out admit that it's delaying a game solely because it doesn't want to get demolished out of the gate, but not unprecedented. In 2020, Everspace 2, The Medium, and a major Path of Exile update all mashed the brakes in order to avoid the Cyberpunk 2077 steamroller. Battlefield 2042 isn't quite that anticipated, but coming literally the day after Century: Age of Ashes' rollout would almost certainly be bad news.

Ironically, Playwing couldn't delay the game too far down the road, because 2022 is turning into a monster year in its own right.