Gravity Rush 2 Has Been Delayed

Keiichiro Toyama, game director of Gravity Rush 2, announced on the PlayStation Blog that the game has been delayed to 2016, but has promised a free DLC as a compensation.

Apart from the DLC, the sequel to the award-winning Gravity Rush is largely more ambitious than the first game, and that's a good reason for the delay in order to allow for further polish.

A different explanation is that the release window in early December is unusually crowded this year, with Super Mario Maker for 3DS, Dead Rising 4, and The Last Guardian all scheduled for release within a week of each other. It could be that Gravity Rush 2 has been delayed in order to avoid such a crowded month, and hence avoid having too much sales competition.

It's also worth mentioning that, not only would Gravity Rush 2 be facing serious sales competition in December in general, but also most of the games releasing that month seem to be titles aimed at the game's own demographics. For example, The Last Guardian is another PS4 exclusive developed in Japan, with Sony's Japan Studio being responsible for the development of both the games. By postponing Gravity Rush 2, the two new games from Japan Studio won't be competing with each other for consumer dollars.

It seems that most delays come from a desire to polish a game a bit more before release, and although Gravity Rush 2 is only being delayed for one month, that might still be true. Maybe the developers wanted to delay it even more, but couldn't do that because of the budget restraints or some other reason, such as the impending release of Persona 5, for example.

Similar to The Last Guardian, Persona 5 is a game aimed directly at the same audience that would purchase Gravity Rush 2. It was in development for years, and is set to release this coming February. Taking into consideration the success of Persona 4, Japan Studio might not want to compete with the followup, and that's why it decided to launch Gravity Rush 2 ahead of Persona 5's currently scheduled North American release date.

Gravity Rush 2 is going to be available on January 20th, exclusively for PlayStation 4.