In the latest update for Prison Architect, alpha update 32, producer Mark Morris and designer Chris Delay talk about some of the new features of the game (which are very thin this update around) as well as the final release window for the game, and a few stats on who is playing the game.
The new update only has two major new features, one involving the lawyer helping get players off some of the nitty gritty things that would usually put them in the dog house. Additionally, death row has been updated to show the threshold of an inmate ready to be executed. There’s also a new update to executions where if a player decides to execute an inmate and turns out that they were actually innocent if an appeal goes through or evidence turns up that they’re innocent, players will immediately be fired.
These features are briefly discussed while interspersed with plenty of banter about the Star Wars: The Force Awakens trailer, some Star Trek talk and a few other tidbits of discussion surrounding the bug-squashing in the game throughout the half hour video below.
Now for the good parts. Morris and Delay talk a little bit about the stats for Prison Architect: who’s playing the game, what age and what sort of interactions they have with the product. It was revealed that 40% of all the players of Prison Architect are under the age of 17. It was also noted that 90% of their players are male – Delay seemed pleased that they at least had a 10% female player base – and it was also revealed that 60% of their audience engages in content on Facebook. I don’t know how much that last stat really plays into anything other than that a lot of people who like micromanaging the lives of prisoners also enjoy spending their time on Facebook, but maybe there’s some overlap with prison and Facebook correlated within that stat somewhere.
Additionally, amidst jokes about Prison Architect arriving at some point on the iWatch, the duo did acknowledge that the game will likely launch before 2015 is out. They set the frame within October, November or December range.
Hence, Prison Architect is due for its final release in the fourth quarter of 2015. No final date has been set just yet. The game has managed quite a bit of popularity during its run in Early Access and you can learn more about Prison Architect by paying a visit to the official website or picking up a copy from over on the Steam store.