It'll be the tragic end of an era if PS5 (and might as well throw in PSVR2) is the first PlayStation generation without a Wipeout. PS2 was a dark period where SCE of America passed the franchise off to third parties to publish, but it still got Fusion as well as a port of the PSP Wipeout Pulse. (PocketStation is the only other unique PS platform I can think of that never had its own Wipeout game.)
There's a rumor that Namco Bandai is doing a
Wipeout in a shared development effort, we'll see if anything comes of that rumor. I don't know what the status of Wipeout Omega Collection developer Creative Vault Studios is (
their website is marked unsafe so I'm not eager to click through to it...) but we haven't heard from them since the 2018 launch of Omega, it's hard to tell if there's hope on that end. (I'd rather a Brit studio than a Japanese studio do Wipeout, as it is very specific in cultural design, though the Designers Republic style isn't the same de rigueur all these years later and also DR could collaborate with a Japanese developer if that's how it had to work out. Whatever works.) So far, the brand is MIA on PlayStation and I don't see corporate viewing the tradition as an important part of their marketplan, but I'd be quite happy if they made a new Wipeout for this gen as it has all others.
Sony did license out a mobile sim-management game called Wipeout Merge (formerly Wipeout Rush,) which IMO could have been a fun hold-over for the franchise while a new game was in the works, but without any new game to tie it to, fans vehemently struck out against it and the mobile crowd never gave it much of a lookover on its own and Wipeout Merge quietly disappeared after a few test market releases.
Wipeout Merge (stylised as wipE'out mErgE and previously known as wipE'out rush) is a 2021 game in the Wipeout series of games for iOS and Android. The game was announced by publisher Rogue Games on September 16, 2021 and initially soft-launched in several regions throughout late 2021, and...
wipeout.fandom.com