In a continuing tale of woe that has surrounded Keiji Inafune's kickstarter project Mighty No. 9 it has been delayed yet again. Originally marketed with a plan of April 2015 release, and then delayed to September, followed by a delay until 2016 with a demo delay for backers before a release date was announced as February 9th, the game is being pushed back even further. This time, the reason for the delay is more issues with the network modes and the matchmaking coding, and backers are being told that it will be released sometime in Spring 2016.
They blame the problem with the matchmaking on two different things. The first is that Mighty No. 9 is on a large number of systems, and each one requires a slightly different solution to work out the problems with it. The second is that Mighty No. 9 is using an engine that no longer updated thus their developers have to recode parts of the engine itself. In particular, the old engine they are using is Unreal Engine 3, which has successfully supported online games like Blade and Soul, Smite, Guilty Gear XRD -SIGN-, Marvel Heroes 2015, Injustice: Gods Among Us, Gears of War: Judgment, Gears of War 3, and many others.
This third delay likely means the game will release at least a year past the original release date for which various reasons have been given on each one. In his post Inafune apologizes and says there is no excuse for it,
"For this 3rd delay of the game, we have no excuses for disappointing our fans and especially our backers once more. We want to take this chance to express our sincerest apologies to everyone who has looked forward to the release."
Quick Take
I'm generally really accepting of delays - I think it's better to delay and launch with a working product then ship and patch. However, this is not only the third delay but another one done at the last moment in between bouts of poor communication, and surrounded by other issues. It's made somewhat worse by the fact that the first delay was to increase scope by some extent with a publisher and that it always seems to be the multiplayer that is the issue - the part that many people care least about. I'm also reminded of at E3 how he kept talking about how it was basically ready to ship then.
