Yesterday, Sony announced that Gran Turismo 5 would miss its previously announced street date of November 5th. Sony gave a vague reason as to the cause of the delay, saying only that “creator Kazunori Yamauchi and the team at Polyphony Digital want to make certain they are creating a racing experience of the highest quality.”

But a senior moderator with alleged ties to Sony at Blu-Ray.com’s forums, has said that the scheduling slip is due to the recent PlayStation 3 jailbreak that opened the platform up to piracy.

As a countermeasure to the jailbreak, Sony updated the PlayStation 3’s firmware to 3.50 and mandated that any game released after October needed to be compliant with that update.

According to the post, which has since been removed, “The problem arose when [Sony Computer Entertainment] mandated [Software Development Kit] 350 on all games releasing after October," says the poster under the alias “Maximus”.

"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 three week slot big enough to make seven million+ copies of this and get them shipped out."

“If you want to blame anyone, I would direct it at the pirates and hackers,” the post concludes. “SCE never had any real SDK restrictions before firmware 3.41 was compromised.”