It’s quite rare for a publisher to push up a release date. This is typically because delivering a product is set for a specific date so that marketing and the expected release season (e.g. targeting the holiday season). These decisions are often made a long time in advance. Shifting a release date in either direction typically affect the estimates because the target release day has a large effect on the overall sales and reception of the game. Moving release dates around tend to screw with the previous plans, which tends to get expensive - rearranging marketing schedules costs a lot. Moving a release date up suggests that there are bigger things happening behind the scenes that would justify the cost, especially because the last quarter of the game’s development cycle tends to be where a lot of the polish happens.

Typically, the further out the team is notified about the release date change, the better. If you know it’s coming, you can schedule your development around it. The closer it comes to happening, the more difficult it becomes. It is not impossible that, for example, Xenoblade Chronicles 3 managed to (somehow) get ahead of schedule and on target to finish super early. However, in my experience this does not tend to be the case. Game development is like air in a tank - it will expand to fill the full volume of the schedule because any additional development time can be spent to add more stuff to the game rather than finishing early. We devs can always improve and polish things if we have more time.

What is more likely to have happened is that there’s some pretty big things happening behind the scenes, likely significantly larger than the expected response to Xenoblade Chronicles itself. What that might be I cannot say for certain, but it’s enough to raise an eyebrow for sure.

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