Ding ding ding. Missing christmas would be a huge deal.
That said, I think there's a tendency for conversations around this to ignore the finances and suggest that financial concerns shouldn't have any impact on the game's release. There's no doubt that CDPR got the balance on this wrong, but the need to find a balance is just reality.
More than just holiday sales -- this point in the console generation is typically the fattest point of the sales curve. The next generation consoles are generating a ton of interest, and the previous generation is at its largest install base. Delaying a year means you miss out on the hype cycle of the new consoles while the last-gen consoles quickly fade in mindshare -- only "legacy" versions of annualized sports franchises sell on that older hardware.
This was probably it. To get it right on all platforms they would have to spend several more months of development. The video game market has a certain size, if you exceed the budget too much you will never be able to make it back. Maybe this too was what caused them to release the last-gen console ports: they were starting to freak out, afraid the project would bankrupt them.
I mean.. they can say that all they want, but they're a game studio that releases one game at a time. This game was "supposed" to release 8 months ago. Financially speaking, it just doesn't make sense that they have any room here.
Ding ding ding. Missing christmas would be a huge deal.
That said, I think there's a tendency for conversations around this to ignore the finances and suggest that financial concerns shouldn't have any impact on the game's release. There's no doubt that CDPR got the balance on this wrong, but the need to find a balance is just reality.