Persona 4 Revival Was Slated for Summer Before GTA 6 Shifted It

You may have suspected it already, but it's now out in the open: Persona 4 Revival wasn't supposed to launch in February. The game's chief producer said in a recent interview that the team first planned to release it about six months earlier. He added that the timing would have suited the summer, but the studio couldn't make it work.

Six months back points to August, though a June or July target would stretch that gap a little further. The signs were already there. Since its formal reveal, Persona 4 Revival has gotten sizzle reels, character-focused trailers and in-depth gameplay showings, somewhere between 10 and 15 videos in total.

By summer, there was barely anything left to show, which usually means a game is close to finished.

It's fair to think Persona 4 Revival was nearly ready well before the date it ended up with. One theory is that the team behind the revival aimed for summer, realized the game wasn't ready yet, and then pushed it back further than necessary. That's where GTA 6 comes in.

This has been the busiest fall in recent memory, with publishers rushing games out in August, September, and October to avoid GTA 6. Others took the opposite route. Studios that couldn't release ahead of it chose to land after it, though not much later. January has Stranger Than Heaven, Until Dawn 2 and Danganronpa 2x2, and the publisher of the last one openly said GTA 6 was behind its delay.

Following that logic, Persona 4 Revival could have shipped in the first week of December. It would have missed The Game Awards, but you'd have had the whole Christmas break to play it. That was probably too close to GTA 6, so the date slid another month and a half.

Now it's one of February's headliners, next to Tomb Raider and Metro, plus around eight other releases worth your attention, including Yu-Gi-Oh! Tag Force GX. Crowded months take their toll, and this one will too. Persona 4 Revival probably isn't among them.

Persona 4 Revival may outsell its rivals, and a 100-hour runtime competes for your time.

It may be the one doing the damage, since it could cut into Fable even though the two aren't the same kind of game. With God of War moved out of the month, Persona 4 Revival may be the biggest release going, and a runtime near 100 hours makes that hard to ignore.

Sales-wise, it looks capable of beating Fable, Tomb Raider and Metro. Two to three million copies in the first few days is a reasonable guess, with three to five million over the first month or two. Landing days after Fable means you'll have to decide where each game fits around a 100-hour adventure.

In July, it would have faced something like Assassin's Creed instead, and two games that size would have been easier to fit in. Still, balancing everything in February is part of the fun, and it stays a what-could-have-been story for Persona 4 Revival.