The next mainline Tomb Raider game is going to be a while. Amazon Games boss Jeffrey Gattis talked about the Tomb Raider Catalyst timeline in an interview with The Game Business, and the reports coming out of it point to 2028 as the earliest we'd see it. The comments made the rounds through secondary sources and social media before the full interview context settled, so treat the framing as reported rather than gospel until you can read the thing yourself.

I covered the delay chatter earlier this week, and this is a decent case study in how muddled a release window gets when an executive comment travels through paraphrases instead of a primary source. All of it traces back to one interview, filtered through social posts. That's thin sourcing for something people are treating like a firm date.

The timing is what makes it interesting. This lands right before the Sophie Turner Tomb Raider series premieres on Prime Video, which is about to put Lara Croft back in the conversation. The old playbook would've been a tie-in game rushed out alongside the show. I still have flashbacks to the movie-tie-in era of the late '90s and early 2000s, when slapping a franchise logo on a half-finished game was just how things were done. Whatever Catalyst ends up being, skipping that trap is the right call.

What we actually know about the game itself is thin. A title, the fact that it exists, and a reported timeline that points well into the future. Beyond that I'd wait for Amazon to say something official before betting anything.

My read: the Prime Video series does the brand maintenance work while the game gets whatever time it needs. Amazon owning both pieces of the puzzle is a luxury most publishers would kill for, because the transmedia push doesn't require shipping a game before it's ready.

For now, if you need a Lara fix, the Survivor trilogy still holds up, and the show is on the way. Shadow of the Tomb Raider shipped in September 2018, so if Catalyst really does land in 2028, that's a decade between mainline entries. Have you replayed Shadow lately? A rushed Catalyst would be worse than a late one, whenever "late" actually turns out to be.