When will GT5 have a release date?

[Seihyouken]

It's not Polyphony Digital keeping this game from us, it's Sony. Less than a week before Gran Turismo 5 was announced to be delayed, Kazunori Yamauchi was confident enough to openly state in an interview that the game would be released in Japan in March. It's hard to believe that the guys at Polyphony Digital discovered a game-destroying glitch in the span of a week after developing the game for over 4 years that caused the game to be delayed by so much that they can't even give us a certain release period so the only logical conclusion is that Sony delayed the game to give it a better release window. In the meantime, Yamauchi and the rest at Polyphony have more time to polish the game and add more cars to Gran Turismo 5's already titanic list.

Knowing this, the logical release window for the game is between June and November, and it will most likely be a worldwide release rather than a slanted release as it would have been had it not been delayed. With God of War III and ModNation Racers coming this spring, it would be in Sony's best interest not to have Gran Turismo hurt the sales of these games by releasing it after them. After Spring though PlayStation 3's exclusive lineup is pretty barren with The Last Guardian and Rockstar North's Agent being the only mildly big releases announced coming at the end of the year. Sony still has time to announce a lineup to beef up their Q3 and Q4 quarters such as the oft rumored Killzone 3, inFamous 2, Resistance 3, MotorStorm 3, Syphon Filter, and Twisted Metal. However, time is quickly slipping away for announcing a big exclusive game for the summer drought that PS3 always relies on. In 2007, PS3 had Warhawk. In 2008, Metal Gear Solid 4. In 2009, inFamous. However, Sony currently has a big hole in their release calander for the summer this year and I believe that Gran Turismo 5 was delayed to fill that hole.

tl;dr - Sony delayed Gran Turismo 5 so that they'd have a major exclusive release for the summer, like they do every year that they're mysteriously lacking this year.