We Avoided Announcing Release Dates To Avoid Disappointment From Delays, Says Sony’s Shuhei Yoshida

Sony went ahead and showed off quite a few games at their E3 presser earlier this week, regardless of what the narrative on the internet may have you believe. The interesting thing was, however, that none of them were shown off with any dates- instead, we got vague release windows, such as ‘Early 2018.’ What was up with that?

Speaking on Gamespot’s E3 2017 live show, Sony Worldwide Studio’s Shuehei Yoshida explained that this was done to avoid the disappointment from delays that tend to happen during development. “Actually, that was really intentional. Like, Gran Turismo Sport coming Fall 2017, or God of War coming early 2018.

“Because in the past we had announced release dates of many games that we had to apologize and push back. PlayStation 4 games are so big that even veteran teams who have been developing games for over ten years still miscalculate how much work has to be done in the very last part of the development with polishing, debugging, etc.

“So, we agreed not to announce a release date until very, very, very close to the release date. That puts a lot of challenge to our marketing and sales teams, but they understood and agreed to let us announce a release window, like a season: Fall, early or Spring, until we are close to the big finish. That’s the reason we didn’t announce the actual dates.”

Okay, so I understand the reasoning, especially since there has so far not been a single major first party game from Sony this generation that didn’t get delayed. I get that- but Sony, wouldn’t it perhaps be smarter to not so chronically keep announcing games that are so far out from release all the time? I bet that might be a better fix for your problem…