As you may know, PS4 exclusive The Last Guardian is poised to release in North America and in Japan on December 6th, in Europe on Decmber 7th, and in the UK on December 9th. Today, Sony's product manager Joe Palmer revealed to MCV that the game's preorder have exceeded Sony's expectations, as well as noted that in particular it has seen a positive response to the game's Collector's Edition.

Specifically, Palmer said the following:

“I can’t comment with specific details, but I can say that pre-orders for The Last Guardian are exceeding expectations. We’ve seen a really positive response to the Collector’s Edition in particular, which despite its higher price point proves there’s a huge appetite for the game.”

Further in the interview, Palmer goes on to talk about the game's long development cycle, fulfilling fan expectations, and trying to avoid building hype.

“When you’re working on a game that has such incredibly high levels of expectation, it’s impossible not to consider the pressure of meeting player expectations. We’ve tried to avoid fuelling the hype by playing on the fact that people have been waiting a long time for this. We want people to be excited because the game looks incredible, not because of its complicated development story.”

As you may know back in 2007, developer Fumito Ueda and his team announced that it had started working on what was called a spiritual successor to Ico and Shadow of the Colossus. The game then made its debut at E3 2009 and was scheuled to launch in 2011. This didn't happen.

The title essentially vanished, until Sony's E3 2015 conference that is. There Sony announced that the game was still being worked on by Fumito Ueda and his team genDESIGN (comprised of many former Team Ico developers) in collaboration with Sony's Japan Studio. Now, almost a decade later, the game is releasing.

If you want to see more coverage of The Last Guardian, including new screenshots and trailers, go here.

Personally, this news doesn't surprise me. I have no clue how Sony expects The Last Guardian to sell, but I imagine many gamers (including myself) are dying to play this. Beyond that, I'm sure there is a large chunk of gamers who plan on picking the game up purely on a strong morbid curiosity. After all, this game is one the craziest stories in the industry in the past decade.