Well, there was that incident with TloU2 where they announced a Feb release, only 1 month later to delay the game another 3 or 4 months (and it got delayed again after if I'm not mistaken).

I honestly don't think there's any reason to suggest they had the date finalised for the SOP but decided to not announce it. 

Even Yotei's release date was in a blog post. 

I honestly can't believe they had no date, decided the date, and to announce it in about 10 days after the SoP.

One thing I can also see is Sony having internally confirmed the release for GTA 6 with Rockstar, and it'll indeed release in the announced date, so they had no way to push Wolverine closer to the holidays anymore as they will need to give it some release room before GTA 6 hits, as the 2 months before it they announced.

So they probably had planned a mid to late October release date if GTA 6 got delayed.

I can't rule out it being decided to appease some of the backslash tho, even Digital Foundry was being quite harsh on their decision to close Bluepoint, and even Playstation focused channels like Mystic which is really cool headed and brings a lot of down to earth positivity to the Playstation community was contemplating if Hermen Hulst should step away like Jim Ryan in his last video. I can only imagine the reactions of the overall community.

It was REALLY bad for their image, as I think it should have been. And they were hiding in such a good mood after the SoP...

I think this is somewhat hyperbolic. Those who actually care about the Bluepoint situation are enthusiasts like you and myself. it's no different from the Japan Studio closing. The vast majority of the PS5 userbase don't care or don't even know. And I would imagine that most of the potential +10 million users for Wolverine are the same.

So, I'm not really sure how this actually helps Sony because either ppl don't care (then the deflection is pointless), or the ppl who do won't be swayed from negativity (which means the deflection is pointless).

Preorders on the PS Store and Steam look pretty good, it also just cracked the 30s in Steam Wishlists (#39). Tomorrow the server slam starts, will Marathon find its miracle?

I'm excited for the server slam.

Jason Schreier is speculating that Sony is moving away from porting their single player games to PC.

That would essentially shut down the novelty of playing PlayStation games on the next Xbox PC lol. And its probably something that wouldn't be considered without Sony's live service revenue.

The Schreier comment is a little weird to me. In an Era post, he seems to know something more certain than speculation.

But in the podcast, he mentions Wolverine as an example. But that was exactly how Sony handled Spider-Man 2. They announced it was coming to PS5 only, then a year later, they announced it on PC.  I hope that he has something more concrete than "Insomniac isn't working on it right now".

They definitely should keep the live service games on PC at least.

Single player depends on how much those are selling there and how much they spend to port and maintain a second version of said games. Plus also the appeal of needing to own a Playstation to play them, so waiting wouldn't help.

I personally don't think it has harmed them at all, but if they feel like mobile PCs already having them can become an issue once they release their portable PS6, so one less reason for people to go for it, maybe that's actually a change they are considering.

Steam numbers for the Marathon test have had a strong start. Less than an hour and already above 120k.

Yeah, when it comes to single-player games, the PC market is very specific about what it likes. The biggest being Multiplayer-centric, RPGs, Strategy, Survival, and Soulslikes.

Very few other kinds of games are able to penetrate those core genres. Which is why Helldivers 2 and Stellar Blade were the biggest sellers on PC that PlayStation has put out. To get anywhere near numbers that are considered successful, only Sony's biggest franchises in Spider-Man and God of War were able to have any sort of impact, and even then, sequels performed lower than previous releases. Everything else (Uncharted, Sackboy, Returnal, Ratchet & Clank, etc) has had middling to dud's in terms of success on PC.

Primarily because those kinds of games have never really been on PC before or have never really found that much success on the platform to begin with.