More information is slowly filtering out about GT5‘s delay, and it fits in neatly with everything else we’ve learned about the game’s production in the past 24 hours. Here’s what was recently posted by Maximus – a respected moderator at the Blu-Ray.com forums with reported connections to Sony:

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.

After getting attention from news outlets such as Eurogamer and TheSixthAxis, evidence of the post has since been removed, but it offers a very reasonable explanation about why Polyphony Digital missed their production window by only 3 days. Sure enough, the new PS3 3.50 firmware is considerably more secure than 3.41 and preventing distribution of a 3.41-compatible GT5 will ensure that it can’t be pirated (for now).

Thanks to all of you who sent this in so quickly!

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