A friendly PSA from your friendly press sneak fuck: if you see headlines like "Halo Infinite delayed out of 2021???" or "Jason Schreier says BOTW2 coming this fall?!?!?!" or really anything involving game release dates that are more than a month or two away, ignore them.
During the pandemic, it's safe to assume no release date is solid until the game is actually downloading on your console. (OK, if we're a week out and the release date hasn't changed, you can probably count on it.) A bunch of people here and on other forums apparently freaked out over me saying over the weekend that I wasn't sure that Halo Infinite and Starfield would come this fall, which suggests that a lot of those folks think that the landscape is a lot more stable than it actually is. Nobody knows anything. Even in the best of times, game developers' timelines are entirely based on educated guesses. During Covid, throw the "educated" part out the window. Madden 22 and Call of Duty Sledgehammer might brute-force their way into coming out on time, but as we've already seen with several big titles over the past few months (Hogwarts Legacy, Gotham Knights etc), most big games are going to be delayed this year if they haven't already been. Just keep that in mind as we get through the year, and enjoy catching up on your backlog. It's always a good time to replay Hollow Knight...
During the pandemic, it's safe to assume no release date is solid until the game is actually downloading on your console. (OK, if we're a week out and the release date hasn't changed, you can probably count on it.) A bunch of people here and on other forums apparently freaked out over me saying over the weekend that I wasn't sure that Halo Infinite and Starfield would come this fall, which suggests that a lot of those folks think that the landscape is a lot more stable than it actually is. Nobody knows anything. Even in the best of times, game developers' timelines are entirely based on educated guesses. During Covid, throw the "educated" part out the window. Madden 22 and Call of Duty Sledgehammer might brute-force their way into coming out on time, but as we've already seen with several big titles over the past few months (Hogwarts Legacy, Gotham Knights etc), most big games are going to be delayed this year if they haven't already been. Just keep that in mind as we get through the year, and enjoy catching up on your backlog. It's always a good time to replay Hollow Knight...
