As many of you will know, the release date of the much-anticipated driving simulation title Gran Turismo 5 was delayed this Wednesday, with publishers Sony looking to announce a new release date before the end of the month. The series’ long-awaited fifth iteration has suffered no shortage of "delay" jokes in its five years in production, despite the fact that it had never actually been delayed in US and European territories, so this setback was hardly welcomed by fans, who may be interested concerning exactly why the game was delayed at the moment.

The answer to this question is piracy. Here’s what Maximus, a respected moderator at the Blu-Ray.com forums with reported Sony connections had to say regarding the subject:

"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."

While, after receiving unwanted attention from online gaming news outlets such as Eurogamer and TheSixthAxis, evidence of the post has since been removed, it offers a reasonable explanation as to why developers Polyphony Digital claimed they missed the production window by only 3 days. Further investigation into the delay reveals that a Sony employee leaked a service USB dongle that runs custom firmware allowing the PS3 to run unsigned applications, for example, a game manager that doesn’t check for copyright protection.

This exploit only affects Firmware version 3.41, therefore the release had to be pushed back in order to remove compatibility with the old firmware version. The new PS3 3.50 firmware version is considerably more secure, and preventing distribution of a 3.41-compatible Gran Turismo 5 will ensure that it can’t be pirated. The only question that remains is: will the game be worth the wait?