After a wave of news articles earlier this week caught wind of some updated release windows for third-party games on PS5, thanks to a footnote at the end of the Sony CES 2021 presentation, Sony has edited the trailer to remove mention of the games and their purported release dates.
The change was noticed by Gematsu, who showed comparison images of the original PS5 CES video and the new edit:
Sony Corp’s YouTube upload of CES 2021 PS5 segment removed all the third-party release dates from the end card of the trailer: https://t.co/XbbuRcxTQ9
Before and after: https://t.co/nV5ctV0Tgh pic.twitter.com/Z73Yh0O6cy
— Gematsu (@gematsucom) January 15, 2021
The new card only features mention of Sony’s own Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart and Horizon Forbidden West (still just set for sometime in 2021), as well as Housemarque’s Returnal, with a set release date of March 19th, 2021.
It removed all mention of the third-party games Pragmata, Solar Ash, Kena, Stray, Ghostwire: Tokyo, Little Devil Inside, Project Athia, and even Hitman III. Why Sony made the change is still unclear. While the company may not have been cleared to reveal dates for games like Project Athia or Pragmata—both of which created a stir and a lot of speculation around publisher timelines—it’s curious that even releases just months or even weeks away, like Hitman 3 and Kena, were also removed.
The change may have come at the request of a third-party publisher who didn’t want their title’s release window public yet, and Sony removed all third-party games in order to create less of a stir than it would have had only the title in question been removed or amended. Project Athia’s release date being listed for January 2022 created a lot of chatter about what Square Enix’s timeline was for both that and Final Fantasy XVI. Pragmata being allegedly pushed out to 2023 also caused a stir, as did late 2021 releases for a number of other games, with specific months listed on the original video.
Sony hasn’t commented on the change, but it’s fair to say that all release dates previously shown that haven’t been officially announced by the respective publishers are now in question. After the disastrous launch of Cyberpunk 2077 last year, and prominent titles like Hogwarts Legacy already seeing delays this year, along with the continued unpredictability of COVID impacting working conditions, it’s no surprise developers and publishers aren’t quite ready to commit to release dates just yet.
