The studio wrote, “Game development is fairly unpredictable, though, especially on games as large as Starbound, and things often take much longer than we could have thought possible. Given that, we’d taken the stance that it’s the beta that will definitely be available this year, not the full game.”
Back in June, the developer announced that Bastion narrator Logan Cunningham would be doing vocal work in Starbound as well.
Starbound is due to be released sometime in 2014.