2020 has been the year of delays in the gaming world, and Sony has been impacted by plenty of these. The delay of titles such as the highly anticipated upcoming installation of The Last of Us 2 has been a big blow to the company’s year, to be certain.
But one of the releases that they insist won’t be delayed is the upcoming next-generation release of the PlayStation 5. The newest release in the legendary console’s lineage is still set for 2020’s holiday season despite the impact of COVID-19.
In a recent interview with Gamesindustry.biz, which you can read in full here, Sony’s Jim Ryan discussed the challenges and impacts of the pandemic. In the interview, he also insists that everything is still on track for a 2020 release.
“It’s been a real rollercoaster of a year,” Ryan states. “We realized a couple months ago that we were going to have to spend a lot more time paying attention to the PS4 community than we anticipated, as that community, along with everybody else in the world, went into lockdown.”
On the surface and out of context, that statement may sound as if Sony wasn’t expecting to have to do much for the PS4 community, but the meaning is clear. Ryan is proud of the efforts that Sony and the PlayStation team put forward to help accommodate their player base during such a chaotic time.
Through the interview, Ryan also discusses upcoming releases. For example, the aforementioned The Last of Us Part 2 is expected to be released at the end of June after the delays and a few leaks impacted the original release.
Afterwards, the team intends to spend July focused on the release of the highly anticipated Ghost of Tsushima, which also suffered a few small delays.
“And really, they were delays that were born out of complete uncertainty about the distribution scenario when we had to pull the trigger,” Ryan states in regards to the push backs. “It was like the world was heading into this big black hole, and we didn’t know whether the internet would be working, we didn’t know whether warehouses would be able to operate.”
Ryan also discusses PlayStation’s Play At Home initiative, one of the many benefits the company offered its player base. With this initiative, the company allowed a few of their titles to be free to play to help encourage social distancing.
As time moves forward, Ryan and the rest of Sony seem incredibly confident that the world won’t be able to throw a challenge their way to slow the release of the PlayStation 5. However, if there’s one thing 2020 has taught us, it’s that you can never fully anticipate the things that no one ever expected.
