Gran Turismo 7 and the next God of War game will not be exclusive to PlayStation 5 — they will likewise be released on PlayStation 4, as indicated by new interview with Hermen Hulst, head of PlayStation Studios.
In the interview, which was conducted for the Official PlayStation Podcast, Hulst shared subtleties on what’s to come from PlayStation, alongside a portion of his musings on PS5 and PS4 development. Sony published excerpts from the visit in a PlayStation Blog post on Wednesday.
Hulst said that the 7-year-old PS4 is “very much” a focus for future game development at Sony, and that the organization can’t and will not leave the 110 million PS4 owners out there. “I think that’d be bad news for fans of PS4, and frankly not very good business,” he said. (For a comparison, Sony said that it had shipped 7.8 million units of the PS5 as of March 31.)
Subsequently, said Hulst, Sony will “continue looking” at developing PlayStation games for both PS4 and PS5. He named Guerrilla Games’ Horizon Forbidden West — which Sony recently said would be a cross-generation title — just as the following God of War game and Gran Turismo 7.
“Where it makes sense to develop a title for both PS4 and PS5 — for Horizon Forbidden West, the next God of War, GT7 — we’ll continue looking at that,” said Hulst. “And if PS4 owners want to play that game, then they can. If they want to go on and play the PS5 version, that game will be there for them.”
The PS4 news comes as an amazement especially for Gran Turismo 7, which Sony marketed as a “PlayStation 5 Exclusive” in a sizzle reel of PlayStation games published in December. Furthermore, in a investor presentation last week, the organization listed the next God of War title as a part of its lineup of upcoming PS5 games, yet avoided it with regard to the PS4 lineup.
Sony has recently evaded questions identified with platform exclusivity. In a interview with The Telegraph around the launch of the PS5, PlayStation president and CEO Jim Ryan said he didn’t have anything “nothing to say about that” when requested to affirm whether the new God of War game would be a PS5 exclusive.
In Wednesday’s interview with the PlayStation Blog, Hulst additionally talked about release windows, saying that the spin-off of 2018’s God of War is currently planned to launch in 2022 — and that Horizon Forbidden West could conceivably hit its recently reported 2021 time frame.
“For Horizon, we think we are on track to release this holiday season,” said Hulst. “But that isn’t quite certain yet, and we’re working as hard as we can to confirm that to you as soon as we can.”
With respect to Gran Turismo 7, Sony declared in February that it had postponed that game to 2022.
They have contacted Sony for additional comment, and they will update this article with any data they get.