The talk around the Twitter water cooler over the last couple of days suggest that Deep Silver will be revealing Saints Row 4 in a few weeks at PAX East, and give the game a Summer launch for the current generation of consoles.
The PAX East reveal is being speculated based on a recent tweet by Deep Silver’s Aubrey Norris, who teased her followers with this message:
“Dear media: You’re going to want to be at PAX East this year. If not, you’re going to be missing out on something HUGE. Just FYI!”
While it is possible that Norris is teasing some other Deep Silver property, the smart money seems to point towards this being the long-awaited Saints Row 4 reveal. After Koch Media (the parent company of Deep Silver) picked up the Saints Row intellectual property in THQ’s bankruptcy auction, the company’s CEO Klemens Kundratitz revealed that both Metro: Last Light and Saints Row 4 would be released during the current calendar year, as THQ had originally planned. The Metro 2033 sequel was recently confirmed for a May release, which leaves the fourth installment of Saints Row as Deep Silver’s only known IP that is still unannounced.
Aubrey Norris didn’t provide any hints as to when their mystery “huge” game would launch, which is where Chris Stockman (the current lead designer at Human Head and the design director on the original Saints Row) comes in. About one month ago Stockman tweeted, “…just to let you know word around the campfire is SR4 is shipping on current gen consoles in late August.”
The August Saints Row 4 release should definitely be considered a rumor, however, the timing actually makes a lot of sense. With Rockstar Games’ “no conspiracy” September release of Grand Theft Auto V, and the anticipated launch of the PlayStation 4 and Xbox 720 later this year, SR4‘s seems to have been pinned into a very narrow release window. If the game launches too soon after GTA V is on the market it will likely be overlooked. If Deep Silver pushes the release back to distance itself from Rockstar’s flagship IP it will end up selling a last-gen game in the middle of a next-gen console launch.
PAX East is scheduled to invade Boston on March 22nd, so it should not be long before we get an official confirmation of Deep Silver’s plans for Saints Row 4 (or whatever it is that they are planning to show off). Once the publisher makes their official announcement we will let you know.
