An insider close to Sony is chalking up the recent delay of Gran Turismo 5 to the recent PS3 hack that has made waves over the last few months, pinning blame on a last-minute SDK switchover. This comes following yesterday’s revelation that GT5 would miss its November 2 release.

A source on the Blu-ray.com forums suggests that looming fears over piracy prompted the setback. Shortly after PSJailbreak and its variants made the rounds, SCE issued a mandate requesting that titles with a post-October release date must be compiled with 3.50 SDK libraries. Here’s the post in full, which has since been removed for reasons unknown:

Like I said it is manufacturing issues. I had it confirmed today.

The problem arose when SCE mandated SDK 350 on all games releasing after after October, GT5 was about to go gold running on SDK 341, but it has been delayed by around a week so that they can update to SDK 350. This has caused a big headache for the manufacturing side, given how big this game is missing the gold date by even a week can cause a months worth of delay as slots are already taken up at this time of year for Blu-ray movies and such. So Sony had to find a 3 week slot big enough to make 7m+ copies of this and get them shipped out.

If you want to blame anyone, I would direct it at the pirates and hackers, SCE never had any real SDK restrictions before firmware 3.41 was compromised.

Certainly sounds plausible. While a switchover to the new SDK is hardly a big deal, you have to factor in QA testing, which can easily take an upwards of a few days to complete, depending how extensive. That, factored in with setting a revised manufacturing date, can easily lead to a delay of this nature.

Fans can rest assured, however, that GT5 will make 2010. While Sony has not yet pinned down a firm date, it’s still on for a “holiday release.”

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