So SE just stated this in a Q&A session during a stockholders meeting held on June 24th.
Question: Normally, you would announce new games at E3, but how has coronavirus affected your plans this year?
Answer: We would normally announce new games at E3, yes. We had planned to have a press conference as a replacement event, but were unable to do so since assets were not complete. We’ll be announcing new titles individually as the timing permits. Several will debut around July to August.
https://www.gematsu.com/2020/06/squ...games-meant-for-e3-2020-around-july-to-august
http://blog.livedoor.jp/majo2/archives/52117280.html
Most of your post makes sense, but I highly disagree with that statement. How do we know that Project Athia releasing next year or after? Project Athia hasn't even have the official name yet, so we're years ahead of release. Listen, I'm pretty sure Project Athia will be a great game without a doubt, but I don't see that the project coming in 3 years. We may never know tbh.
I don't think having a name or not is indicative of anything, Nier Automata was announced without a final title yet, so was Octopath, even if both of those are lower budget games than what Project Athia is that doesn't really mean they can be made faster or not, take for example Persona 5, much lower budget compared to SE's AAA RPGs yet it still took 5 years for them to make.
Nier Automata's reveal trailer also didn't even show any gameplay, just some concept art for most of it with text, and then 10 seconds at the end of 2B landing on the ground, standing up and looking at the camera. In comparison we've seen gameplay footage for Project Athia in the reveal.
Given Athia has already been in development for 2 years right now, it could very well slide into 2021 or 2022, as a reminder in comparison the FFXV stuff we saw in 2013 was created in the span of 1 year from July 2012 to June 2013, they then essentially restarted all the asset creation from scratch as they started to migrate to Lumionus in July 2013 and the game came out 3 years later while they were making the engine alongside the game, from the point XV started from scratch on Luminous in July 2013 til it released in November 2016 it had been 3 years and 4 months, 2021-2022 for Athia is already 3-4 years of dev time which is about as much as FFXV earnestly got, so I think that a 2021-2022 launch for Project Athia is still pretty realistic to assume.
It's now been 3 years since XV released with the engine being even more polished since then, and Athia wouldn't have the same drawbacks than XV had in having to restart asset creation from scratch because of a generational shift, it's also not even know how big Athia will actually be, whether it's FFXV style massive or smaller more closer to Nier Automata's scale and more segmented areas. Given how efficient the Luminous team were on XV and have been since its very possible it could launch in either FY2021 (start of April 2021 - end of March 2022) or FY2022 (start of April 2021 - end of March 2023).
I wonder if there might have been a "planned leak" element to it.
I dunno, doesn't really feel like a planned leak kinda situation, like Imran Khan said people likely just got their wires crossed.
Btw the same link above saying they have announcements planned for July-August also had another question asking about stealth marketing and they answered saying they don't think stealth marketing is is a form of advertisement they wanna do nor have they received reports of it being implemented in anything they're doing, I think a "planned leak" would fall into what is considered "stealth marketing".