UPDATE:
Namco Bandai has just confirmed that Project Cars has indeed been pushed back to next year—March 20, 2015 in Europe, to be precise.
"The move positions the title away from the competitive holiday scene dominated by household names while affording the team at Slightly Mad Studios additional time to extend and polish their ground-breaking and accomplished next-gen racing experience that’s been created alongside a community of over 85,000 racing fans and real-life professional drivers."
ORIGINAL ARTICLE:
The development director behind Slightly Mad Studios’ Project Cars has allegedly confirmed that the racer has been delayed until early 2015.
News comes from a supposed forum post by Andy Garton, which was picked up by NeoGAF on a members-only section of the WMD forums.
According to the screen grab, Garton confirmed, “the new release date for the PC/PS4/XB1 versions of the game is now March next year. We wanted you guys to read it here first and to try and expand a little more on the reasoning.
"Primarily, this has come about because a couple of other big games have announced they are shipping around the same time as our planned first date. We know it might be a little hard to believe but this would have had a very significant impact on our initial sales (and the initial sales period is critical as that’s when the majority occur). It became immediately clear therefore that we’d need to move away from this release window.
The post adds: "The other factor at play here which I’m sure most if not all of you are aware of is that the game is still lacking the fixes and polish it really deserves. We’ve been working extremely hard on tracking towards the original date, and could indeed have made it, but deep down we knew it wouldn’t have resulted in the ultimate level of quality that we wanted. Project CARS isn’t ‘just another game’ for SMS, it’s the start of our very own IP/brand which we believe can live and be successful for a long time. It’s critical the first release is a solid one therefore to lay the foundations for those plans.
"As such we decided that a release early next year made a lot of sense all round. January is traditionally a very slow month for game sales (people having spent all their spare cash up to and during the holidays). February is affected to a lesser degree so March is an ideal window."
Project Cars was originally pencilled in for a North American release on November 18 and November 21 in Europe—the same day as Grand Theft Auto V for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
We sampled the game a few weeks ago and found it to be in great shape, though, so at least there’s no concern there.
Stay tuned to PSU for more details.