As part of a new 'Letter from the Chairman' update on the still-in-development billion-dollar space simulator and galactic-sized Star Citizen, Roberts Space Industries founder and CEO Chris Roberts has confirmed that the cinematic single-player offshoot Squadron 42 is no longer on track for a Q4 2026 release.
The single-player game, which mixes aerial dogfighting with on-the-ground shooting, features a star-studded cast that includes Henry Cavill, Gary Oldman, Mark Strong, Jon Rhys-Davies, Gillian Anderson, Ben Mendelsohn, and Andy Serkis. The 2026 release window was announced back in 2024, when it was revealed that the game was 'feature-complete' and in a bug-squashing and polish phase.
Popular Now: Modder implements DLSS 5 into Control using DLL from NBA 2K 27, mod drops performance from 71 FPS to 35 FPS on an RTX 5070 TiThe reason for the delay? GTA 6. "Much like the rest of the industry, there is no way I want to launch my spiritual successor to Wing Commander, a game that has had twelve years of blood, sweat, and tears invested into it, launching into the attention buzz saw of GTA 6," Chris Roberts writes.
"While GTA6 isn't launching on PC this November, pretty much all outlets and most content creators will be all over it, not leaving a lot of room for other coverage," Roberts adds. "We have taken a look at the release windows at the start of 2027, and decided that Q2 provides a better time for Squadron 42 to release."
This puts the release window for Squadron 42 somewhere in April to June 2027. Getting out of the way of GTA 6 makes sense, as well as Q1 2027, which will see the launch of heavy hitters like Fable, Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis, God of War: Laufey, Metro 2039, and more. Chris Roberts also notes that the delay comes down to Star Citizen and Squadron 42 development happening simultaneously.
"One of the reasons that Squadron 42 has been taking the time it has is that we were always reassigning resources onto Star Citizen to get the patches out, which pushed back Squadron," Roberts explains. "In fact, after our 2023 CitizenCon in LA where we showed off a lot of the functionality we were working on for Squadron, the majority of the gameplay engineering team spent a large part of 2024 bringing a lot of the features into Star Citizen at the expense of Squadron."
Right now, there's an almost 50/50 split among the 600+ developers across the studio(s) working on each game.
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Once Squadron 42 is out, most of these developers will be reassigned to Star Citizen to accelerate the push to Version 1.0. Also, to highlight the late-stage of development on the highly anticipated Squadron 42, Chris Roberts adds that a small number of "original backers" and select Star Citizen content creators will get a chance to play Squadron 42 in October 2026, which is when we'll get a lot more info on the game.
