# Undead Labs Games Are Somehow Still A Thing, And I Have Questions
Look, I get it. We’re all living in a timeline where everything is trash. The economy is a dumpster fire, AI is coming for your jobs, and somehow the *Walking Dead* franchise is still churning out content despite nobody asking for it. But what I genuinely cannot wrap my head around is how Undead Labs, the gaming studio that’s been promising us the zombie apocalypse simulator of our dreams since like 2013, is still kicking. And not just kicking—they’re apparently getting *state funding* now, because of course they are.
Let me paint you a picture. You’re a gamer in 2024. You’ve been burned by more broken launches than you can count. You’ve pre-ordered *Cyberpunk 2077*, you’ve defended *No Man’s Sky* through its redemption arc, and you’ve accepted that *Starfield* is fine, I guess, if you’re into loading screens and procedural disappointment. But through it all, Undead Labs has been there—like that weird uncle who shows up to Thanksgiving with a bag of gas station gummies and talks about his “big business idea” that’s definitely going to take off any day now.
I’m talking about *State of Decay 3*, the game that was announced in 2020 during the Xbox Games Showcase with a cinematic trailer that was basically just a woman crying in a forest while a zombie deer looked menacing. That’s it. That’s the whole announcement. No gameplay. No release date. Just vibes and the implication that we should be excited. And we were, because we’re idiots.
Four years later. *Four years.* And what do we have? A few concept art drops, some job postings, and a studio that’s apparently still trying to figure out how to make a game that isn’t held together with duct tape and prayer. Remember *State of Decay 2*? That game launched in 2018 and was so broken that even the apocalypse felt less buggy. Characters clipping through walls, cars launching into orbit, zombies T-posing like they’re about to drop the hottest diss track of 2024. It was a mess. A beautiful, janky mess that I somehow put 200 hours into because I have no standards and a deep-seated need to hoard canned beans in a digital world.
But here’s the thing: Undead Labs isn’t just any studio. They’re a *Microsoft first-party studio*. That means they’ve got Daddy Xbox’s credit card. And in 2024, Microsoft announced they’re giving Undead Labs a $2.9 million tax break from the state of Washington. That’s right. Your tax dollars are going to fund a game that’s been in development hell for so long that the original *State of Decay* is old enough to vote in some states.
Now, I’m not saying Undead Labs is a scam. I’m saying they’re the gaming equivalent of that friend who says they’re “working on a novel” but you’ve never seen them write a single word. They’ve got the vibes. They’ve got the concept art. They’ve got the commitment to making a game where you can customize your base with a level of detail that would make a Sims player blush. But do they have a release date? No. Do they have gameplay footage? Lol, no. Do they have a plan for how to make *State of Decay 3* not feel like a tech demo from 2015? Your guess is as good as mine.
And let’s talk about the zombie genre for a second. We’re in 2024. Zombies are so 2010. We’ve moved on to vampires, werewolves, and whatever the hell *The Last of Us* did with cordyceps. The zombie market is saturated. *Dying Light 2* already did the parkour zombie thing. *Days Gone* already did the biker zombie thing (and got canceled because Sony hates fun). *Project Zomboid* is out here being the most realistic zombie survival sim ever made by a team of like three people in their mom’s basement. What does Undead Labs bring to the table? Permadeath? *XCOM* did it better. Base building? *Fallout 4* did it bigger. Co-op survival? *7 Days to Die* did it jankier, but at least they update their game.
The real punchline here is that Undead Labs is making a game about surviving the apocalypse while *being* a studio that’s barely surviving the development cycle. It’s art imitating life imitating a game that’s been delayed so many times it’s become a meme.
I want to believe, okay? I want to believe that *State of Decay 3* will be the zombie game that makes me feel something again. I want to believe that Microsoft’s money and Washington’s tax breaks will result in something more than a prettier version of the same janky zombie sandbox we’ve been playing for a decade. But I’ve been burned before. We all have. And right now, Undead Labs is giving me major *“we’ll release it when it’s ready”* energy, which in gaming terms means *“we have no idea what we’re doing, please stop asking.”*
So here’s my hot take: Undead Labs should just release whatever they have. Call it *State of Decay 3: Early Access Apocalypse Edition*. Let us break it. Let us find the bugs. Let us laugh at the zombies clipping through walls while we hoard digital painkillers and wonder why we bother. Because at this point, I’d rather play a broken game than wait another four years for a game that might not even be good.
But hey, what do I know? I’m just a cynical Reddit user who’s been burned by too many launch trailers. Go ahead, Undead Labs. Prove
Final Thoughts
Having spent years watching promising studios stumble over their own ambitions, it’s clear Undead Labs has achieved something genuinely rare: they’ve turned a buggy, janky survival sim into a legitimate, beloved franchise through sheer dedication to iterative, community-driven design. While *State of Decay 2* never shed its B-movie production values, its deep simulation of scavenging, permadeath, and base management carved out a niche that triple-A behemoths still haven’t dared to touch. The real tragedy now is watching Microsoft’s acquisition and corporate restructuring threaten to sand off the very rough edges that made the series feel alive—if they homogenize this studio into just another Cog in the machine, they’ll have killed one of the last truly player-owned sandboxes in zombie gaming.