The Last of Us Part II PS4 PlayStation 4 Sony 1

Perhaps one of the most vocal criticisms aimed at Sony is that it announces games too early. While we’re yet to see any real big cancellations from the company since the heady days of The Getaway 3, it has been at the helm of some laughably late projects – the brilliant but embarrassingly overdue The Last Guardian being the most prominent example of all.

And speaking with Games Industry, Worldwide Studios bigwig Michael ‘Murasakeh Babeh’ Denny has admitted that the organisation (like other publishers) is still learning when the “right time to announce games” is. The executive was speaking specifically about Ghost of Tsushima, and noted that Sony had waited for the project to be in the right place before revealing it.

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“In the past, I think it's fair to say sometimes we announced games too early,” he admitted, before pivoting to Sucker Punch’s samurai title. “I think it's the right time to announce that, and they've been working on that game for a long time now. There is a great [playable version of the game] already. So we're just excited to let everybody know about it.”

To be frank, we’re not sure where we stand on this. While we can understand the frustration from people who feel like they have to wait too long for titles to release, let’s imagine a scenario in which Naughty Dog didn’t announce The Last of Us: Part II yet. All we’d be doing, as fans and media, is trawling through resumes and job listings to find out what it’s up to.

It’s a tricky one. There are advocates of short announce/release cycles out there, but games need marketing cycles – particularly if they’re new intellectual properties. We reckon Horizon: Zero Dawn was a text book example of how things should be handled; it was released within two years, and Guerrilla always had something new to show at each major event.

[source gamesindustry.biz]