Yes, way too early for my taste. Breath of the Wild also took way too long, though in hindsight I can see the reason why they held it back for so long.

I see no advantage at all when a game is announced several years before it can be released. Hype doesn't need that long to be established, hype might only need a few weeks even; in fact, hype may even be cooling down during the long wait. Also, it should be obvious that no studio in the entire industry sits on their asses for years just waiting and doeing nothing. They all are constantly making games.

When did Sony announce Agent? Like in 2008? Ya way too soon!

Most publishers announce way too early, movies are much the same. The most annoying thing is when they release fleshed out trailers, beyond mere concept shows, a year or two before the actual release date. Having 3-4 year development cycles for entertainment projects is crazy.

Well, I wouldn't say only Sony, I've noticed that from Microsoft, too. Too early announcements for games, some of them end up really bad or are getting canceled in the process and some being delivered with what they promised. But I guess this is being done to keep the hype up and show that their console have the software to look for.
For the most time, Nintendo announces the games which will be releases within a year. There are some exceptions of course like some Zelda games.

Sony gave us great shows in 2015 and 2016, but that came with a catch. 

E3 2017 had trailers all from previously shown games, with almost nothing new. E3 2018 is also looking to be more of the same, because all their major first and second party studios games have all been announced long before, or just came out. They will waste time Days Gone for the third E3 in a row.

Definitely not as bad as Square Enix but still annoying at times. I think Monster Hunter World was a great example of announcing a title at just the right time before release.

I wish more publishers would do it like Bethesda does - announce game at E3 and then release it before the next E3 at least. But I don't see it happening with platform holders. As others said, they announce early to create hype around their system. Microsoft said that they don't want to announce too early after what happened to Scalebound, Fable Legends and Crackdown 3. And now everyone thinks that they've got nothing to show. Probably it is true but maybe not. So right now it looks like not announcing too early hurts platform holders way more than announcing too early.

I'm not mad about them announcing games early, the E3 hype is an integral part of Sonys brand, so in order to be able to stuff their shows with excitement, they have to announce games early, but it does flatten the hype curve a lot.

Half of the stuff, I forget about and when we see the next trailer go:'Oh yeahhhh....this game.' and the other half, while it never really leaves your radar is split into 'worried it got cancelelled' and 'Oh, it finally came out' territory.

I really like the short announcement circles Nintendo has done for the Switch so far (in contrary to WiiU, wich had loooooong ass announcements cicles), you never quite know what's around teh corner and it keeps things exciting.

Well, what choice do they have? Big games take years to develop and thousands of game journalists, private bloggers, youtubers and fans of developer X are hunting down every information snippet they can get for the next project this developer (or artist or voice actor) is working on and leaks that info/rumour.

At some point these games have to be announced before someone of all the people involved in the project spills the beans. If you don't want these announcements too early you have to stay away from the internet (especially gaming sites like VGC and E3 presentations) and just wait for the TV ad of games.

With the Xbox you dont know anything about whats comeing in the future......
That is MUUUUCH worse than knowing a game is comeing 2years from now imo.

So the short of it, I like knowing stuff thats a 1 year+ out from today.