After a messy legal battle, the developers behind Subnautica 2 are finally releasing the highly anticipated underwater survival game into early access on Steam. And as recently announced, the release date is very soon: May 14. This has thrown a wrench in the plans of one upcoming and also highly anticipated indie game, Outbound, which is now going to arrive on PC a few days early to avoid Subnautica 2′s big splash.
On April 30, as spotted by GamesRadar, the devs behind cozy RV simulator Outbound announced that the team wants to avoid competing with Subnautica 2‘s upcoming release on Steam.
“The highly anticipated title Subnautica 2 just revealed their release date – which falls exactly on our planned release date May 14th,” posted the devs in a Steam blog post. “Even though we are very hyped for their game and big fans of the franchise, we think that it is best to not compete with such an highly anticipated title on that day.”
The devs say they need to “dodge the Leviathan,” and so Outbound is now arriving on May 11 on PC and Xbox, the same platforms where Subnautica 2 will soon be available. Meanwhile, on PS5, Nintendo Switch, and Switch 2, Outbound is launching on the planned May 14 as the underwater survival game won’t launch on those platforms. The devs behind Outbound also confirmed that this means the demo for the cozy indie game will be removed on May 8.
For now, Outbound, which has over 1 million wishlists on Steam, seems to be the only notable and popular upcoming indie game to dodge out of the way of Subnautica 2. Will we see other games that are set to arrive around May 11 also move out of the wake of the underwater survival sim? Will this be another Silksong situation where more games try to avoid being overlooked and pick a new date? We’ll see and update this post if that happens.