Horizon Forbidden West has reportedly been pushed back to the first quarter of 2022, according to a new Bloomberg report. That would push the release date of Horizon Forbidden West from its previous window to late 2021, pushing back another of the games Sony has unveiled for the PS5. While developer Guerrilla Games has never given a specific release date for the game, its executives have previously suggested the game will launch this year, with the company tweeting in May that "development is on track." While GamesBeat's Jeff Grubb reported that Sony was deliberating whether to delay the game, Bloomberg's source claims that the publisher has delayed it. < p lang="en" dir="ltr">Sony has postponed the PlayStation exclusive Horizon Forbidden West to the first quarter of 2022, a source told Bloomberg, confirming a rumor shared by @JeffGrubb yesterday. Latest Game Industry Trick Delays In 2021 https://t.co/8atrR25oxdJuly 30, 2021 See More Bloomberg's report didn't say why the game's release date was delayed, but it would be the last of a series of AAA game releases that have been delayed to give studios more time, most recently in June. After God of War: Ragnarok was pushed back to 2022. It's unclear if these upcoming games have been delayed specifically due to Covid-related development delays or if they're just ordinary release date delays that are typical of the gaming industry. the videogames. It's easy to imagine why lockdown and remote work would slow down game development, but studios suddenly became coy about naming Covid as the cause of the delays. In April 2020, for example, announcements openly cited the pandemic as the reason The Last of Us 2 and Death Stranding were delayed to July releases, while in August Deathloop and Halo Infinite were confirmed to be delayed until ' in 2022. But in early 2021, studios and publishers reconsidered the overall reasons and waves of delays, like with Sony's Outriders and open-world Gotham Knights. What changed? The video game industry may have been sympathetic to the Covid delays, but there could be a bigger reason: Cyberpunk 2077, which launched in December 2020 with so many groundbreaking bugs that it's been pulled from the Sony PS4 store and even in June 2021, the CEO of developer CD Projekt Red promised that the game's team would continue to fix issues until the game "delivers as promised". In other words, it's worth delaying months or a year and irritating players to avoid releasing a buggy game that still hasn't lived up to expectations six months later.