The PS4 and Xbox One versions of Hogwarts Legacy have been delayed yet again, with Avalanche Software and WB Games pushing them back by a bit over a month to May 5. The last-generation ports of Hogwarts Legacy were last delayed in December, when the publisher decided to move ahead with releasing the PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S versions of the game on February 10 while giving the developers more time to optimize the new Harry Potter RPG for older hardware.Such staggered launch strategy resulted in Warner Bros. attaching four release dates to Hogwarts Legacy. It has so far honored two of those and might still go three out of four, though this newest development doesn't exactly inspire confidence in that outcome.As for the April 4 release date previously targeted by the PS4 and Xbox One versions of Hogwarts Legacy, those ports have now been pushed back to May 5. The latest post from the game's official Twitter account said the developers require a bit more time to create "the best possible experience" on Sony and Microsoft's last-gen consoles. The wording of that statement suggests the delay was prompted by relatively obvious optimization challenges associated with porting any technically ambitious open-world RPG to Xbox One and PS4, both of which are pushing 10 years old nowadays.
Hogwarts Legacy was initially planned to release in 2021 before getting hit with a couple of significant postponements in the two years following its September 2020 announcement. This newest development makes for a total of three delays suffered by the game's PS4 and Xbox One ports. And while the Switch version only received an official release date back in late 2022, it remains to be seen whether it manages to hit that target if even the significantly more powerful hardware from Sony and Microsoft is proving to be such an optimization challenge for the developers.
The technological gap between the last-generation platforms targeted by Hogwarts Legacy can be somewhat illustrated using the imperfect teraflops metric, which indicates how many trillions of floating-point operations a given system can perform in a second. The PS4 leads this comparison with 1.84 teraflops, whereas the Xbox One and Switch measure in at 1.41 and 0.5 teraflops, respectively. For context, the Xbox Series X boasts 12 teraflops, while the PS5 manages around 10% less.
Given how last-generation console have a combined installed base of nearly 300 million units, according to turn-of-the-year data, it's plausible the latest Harry Potter game will lose some of its commercial momentum come early spring due to this newly announced delay. But that's not to take away from its existing success, which is underlined by the fact that Hogwarts Legacy has already been dominating key markets for three straight weeks and counting.
Hogwarts Legacy is available now on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S, with PS4 and Xbox One versions launching May 5 and a Switch port releasing July 25.
