Raft, if you’re unfamiliar, first gained attention as a free itch.io prototype back in 2016. After a two year spell expanding the game’s core survival loop - in which players chart their raft across a vast ocean, reeling in food, supplies, and building materials to turn their initially tiny vessel into a veritable sea-faring palace - Redbeet launched into Steam early access in 2018. Raft has come a long way since then, gaining the likes of online co-op, explorable islands, underwater reefs, crop growing, cooking, animal care, and even a full story campaign for its version 1.0 release on PC, which arrived this June. Raft has proven popular throughout its development journey, and questions about a console release have been aimed at Redbeet with some regularity. Those calls have now finally been answered in a post on Steam, with the studio confirming it’s “actively working” on adapting Raft for consoles. “We strive to be able to release it on as many platforms as possible,” it explained, “and hope we can give as many players as possible the chance to build their own raft!”. Redbeet says it wants the console experience to be “just as good as the PC game” and to make sure “everything looks and feels as good as possible”. This, it adds, “takes a bit of time”. As such, the studio isn’t quite ready to divulge release dates or specifics about the consoles it’s developing for, but it says to expect further news “as soon as we have more to share”.
