At GDC 2010, I was surprised to learn that SOCOM 4 was a Fall 2010-bound title. Not because it looked bad--it didn't at all. But because of the PlayStation Move motion integration, which was just added in. It's gotta be hard to make sure your game will work for both control styles within a matter of months, right? But regardless of whether I was right or wrong on that (and let's face it, a billion things need tweaked during development), SOCOM 4 has become a 2011 title.
Zipper confirmed this news on its official blog, stating that it didn't "want to take any shortcuts," therefore the game has been pushed back from 2010. No specifics were given, so keep that in mind in light of my PS Move spiel. Also, no release-month window was thrown out there, although I'm sure it'll hit in Q1 with every other game on the planet.
SOCOM 4 will follow 2008's SOCOM: Confrontation, a Slant Six Games joint that suffered from an atrocious launch riddled with bugs, balance issues, and worst of all, server woes that made the game unplayable. I suppose that Zipper could be erring on the side of caution to make sure this level of mess doesn't happen again, as I can't imagine console SOCOM fans are going to stick around after another bad launch.