The coronavirus health pandemic has become a real mess all around the world. It has stopped industries from progressing forward with their intended schedules for the year, jobs have been lost, and being stuck at home during lockdown has given plenty of people some cabin fever. With all that said, gamers may have been eager to enjoy some new video game titles to help pass the time. Unfortunately, one of the more anticipated releases this year was delayed all due to the coronavirus.
The Last of Us Part 2 was epic adventure plenty of gamers all around the world were eager to dive into. Unfortunately, because the COVID-19 has struck markets worldwide, this has caused developers to work from home and even prevented some packages to ship overseas. This ultimately resulted in development studio Naughty Dog to postpone the release of their upcoming game. While we’re waiting for it to get released into the market, yet again, there are some wondering if Naughty Dog and Sony would just offer a digital early copy release.
This digital early copy is nothing new as we’ve seen Square Enix do the same for select markets when it came to Final Fantasy 7. However, that early digital release was only for select markets meaning that not everyone had the same ability to get their copy early. When speaking to PlayStation Blogcast, game director Neil Druckmann commented on the delay of The Last of Us Part 2 and the speculation that we may see this game released digitally first.
Is the internet infrastructure there to like support in all countries? You know, this is a worldwide game that people in every country are waiting for, and we want to make sure we’re fair. If we just get it to like a small fraction of people, what does that do to all the people that don’t get it?
Unfortunately, those that are hopeful for a digital release may be out of luck as Neil was quick to debunk the thought of an early digital version of this game. It also comes down to what markets feature a means to support digital downloads.