One day before launch, extraction shooter Sand gets delayed again—oh, and it's an early access game now, too

A big mobile mechanical base in the desert — (Image credit: tinyBuild)

Welp, once again Sand: Raiders of Sophie—the hotly anticipated PvPvE extraction shooter where you build and pilot big stompy mechanical bases across an alien planet—has been delayed.

And this time, the delay was announced a mere one day before it was supposed to launch. Yikes.

Just yesterday the global launch times and regional pricing for Sand: Raiders of Sophie were posted in the game's Discord, seeming to indicate that the launch was a go. But this morning, another announcement said the game would be delayed until June 22—and when it does launch, it'll now be an early access game instead of a full release. Yikes, again.

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This isn't the first time Sand has been delayed: for months, the release date was listed on Steam as "March 2026," until in the final week of March the developer finally admitted the game wasn't quite ready. And here we are again.

"It’s been a crazy few days, with SAND featuring at Summer Games Fest and the Server Slam exceeding our expectations on the number of players," publisher TinyBuild said on Steam. "We’ve welcomed tens of thousands of new smugglers into the world of SAND and it’s shown us just how special what we have on our hands really is."

Noting extensive feedback (both positive and negative) from players on balancing and features, "It’s clear we need to more closely involve the community in our development, and so we’ve decided to release into Early Access to work towards the best possible version of SAND: Raiders of Sophie," the publisher said.

"What’s also clear is we can’t reliably serve enough players with our current server structure," the announcement continued, hence the delay until the new release date: June 22.

"We will also do a sanity check playtest around June 15, next week. In a way the server slam achieved its goal: the servers definitely got slammed, and we gathered invaluable information on why," TinyBuild said in the official Sand Discord.

"Over half of you experienced connectivity issues which were revealed at the higher online population. The good news is we have a plan to stabilize the servers. We just need a bit more time."

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.