No One Noticed Tomb Raider Catalyst Just Slipped to 2028

Amazon wants you to get excited about Luna. It does not, apparently, want you to notice that the biggest new Tomb Raider game in years just lost an entire year from its release window.

Jeffrey Gattis, Amazon's head of gaming, confirmed in an interview with The Game Business that Tomb Raider: Catalyst is now targeting 2028. The game was announced at The Game Awards in December 2025 with a 2027 window for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S. Gattis didn't frame it as a delay. He didn't even pause on it. He just said it.

"Obviously, we've announced the two Tomb Raider titles. Legacy of Atlantis comes out February 12 of next year, and then we'll follow on in 2028 with Tomb Raider Catalyst, so we're excited about those. There are some other AAA things that are in various stages of discussion right now."

That's the entire disclosure. Buried inside a long conversation about Amazon Luna's future as a cloud gaming platform, sandwiched between talk of content portfolios and hardware pricing. No standalone announcement, no updated trailer, no statement from Crystal Dynamics. If you weren't reading a niche industry interview about streaming strategy, you missed it completely.

A Pattern of Slippage

This follows a trajectory that was already looking shaky. Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis, the Unreal Engine 5 remake of the original game, was supposed to launch in 2026. It slipped to February 12, 2027. Now Catalyst, the brand-new entry set in Northern India, has followed suit with its own one-year push. Both games have shifted by exactly one year from their original windows, which at least suggests a coordinated recalibration rather than a crisis. But Crystal Dynamics has been through four rounds of layoffs in twelve months, according to reporting from IGN, and the Embracer-owned studio's capacity to ship two major Tomb Raider games in quick succession was always going to be tested.

I'm less bothered by the delay itself than by how Amazon chose to communicate it. Studios delay games constantly, and a 2028 window for a game built on Unreal Engine 5 with the scope Catalyst is promising doesn't strike me as unreasonable. What does bother me is treating a year-long delay for one of gaming's most recognisable franchises as a throwaway line in a cloud gaming pitch. Players who've been tracking Catalyst since its reveal deserve better than having to parse an executive's interview for buried schedule changes. A single tweet would have done the job.

Gattis spent far more of the interview talking up Luna's potential, arguing that rising hardware costs for consoles and PCs could push players toward cloud gaming. He referenced Steam Machine pricing starting at $1,000 and rumours of next-gen consoles exceeding that figure. Amazon updated Luna just this week to let Prime members with a Fire TV in the US and UK play games like Hogwarts Legacy and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle through the Prime Video app. The framing was clear: Luna is the priority, and Tomb Raider is part of a content portfolio meant to give the platform an identity.

Alix Wilton Regan voices Lara Croft in both upcoming games, replacing Camilla Luddington from the Survivor Trilogy. Amazon is also producing a Tomb Raider TV series for Prime Video starring Sophie Turner. With Legacy of Atlantis locked in for February 12, 2027, Catalyst now sits at least a year behind it with no specific release date beyond the 2028 calendar year.