Unless you’ve been fast asleep since last week, you’ve probably already heard the news that the development of Metroid Prime 4 is being entirely restarted. Nintendo issued an official statement on the game’s progress last Friday, telling us that Retro Studios would now be working on the title and apologising for what will be a pretty lengthy delay.
With the game now being started over from the very beginning, we’d imagine it won’t see a release until at least 2021/22, and possibly a couple of years later still, but it would seem that not everyone has received this particular message. Despite being among the first to open up pre-orders for the game when it was first announced a couple of years ago, major worldwide retailer Amazon seems to be offering very mixed messages concerning the product’s release.
On the US version of the site, Amazon still has the game listed under a generic 31st December 2019 release date, put in place in response to Nintendo’s original “2019” estimate with pre-orders still fully intact despite the product essentially being put on hold. Things get weirder still on the UK site, where the game has two separate listings – one saying that it will be released on 28th December 2018 (which has already been and gone, obviously) and another saying the year 2030.
Hopefully it goes without saying that any pre-orders made for Metroid Prime 4 will absolutely not be fulfilled by those dates (well, apart from the 2030 option we hope). It could be well over a year before Nintendo even talks about it again, so it might be best to ignore any purchasing options for now.
If you haven’t already, make sure to let us know how you feel about the Metroid Prime 4 delay on our Talking Point feature. You can always leave us a quick comment below, too!