Planet Zoo 2: what is known, what is not

Planet Zoo 2 goes on sale on 13 October 2026, three weeks and a day from this writing. Frontier Developments announced it on 28 May and has said almost nothing about it since. That leaves the storefronts and the ratings boards as the record, and this week they are worth reading side by side, because they agree about the money to the penny and disagree about almost everything to do with age.

Everything below was read on 22 September 2026. The script in code/zoo-listing-audit.py re-reads the same four endpoints and prints the same tables, so none of it has to be taken on trust.

It needs nothing but a Python install and a network connection:

python zoo-listing-audit.py

Correction, 10 October 2026: the script now re-reads three of those four endpoints, not four. It reads each site's robots.txt before its first request there and skips any page that file closes to automated readers, and the ESRB's robots.txt closes its rating pages and search results to a group of named crawlers. For the ESRB the script prints the two certificates as they were read on 22 September, marked as such, next to the ESRB labels the Steam, Microsoft and PlayStation listings show when it runs. It also names itself in every request instead of presenting itself as a web browser. The rest of the article is unchanged.

The part worth reading is how the PlayStation price is extracted, because a single product page carries the cache for several products and the naive regular expression returns whichever one happens to come first:

# The sku suffix is regional: -U001 on the US store, -E001 on the UK one.
own = re.search(r'"value":"' + re.escape(product)
                + r'-\w{4}".{0,600}?"basePrice":"([^"]+)"', page, re.S)
cta = sorted(set(re.findall(r'"GameCTA:(\w+):\w+:' + re.escape(product), page)))

Anchoring on the product's own sku id is what makes the Deluxe row read 64.99 USD rather than repeating the standard edition's 49.99.

The date, which nothing contradicts

Frontier's announcement says it plainly: "Planet Zoo 2 will launch on PC, PlayStation®5, and Xbox Series X|S October 13, 2026." Four storefronts carry that day, and the two that publish a timestamp publish the same one.

Two stores publishing the same second is not the normal case. When we looked at Gothic II Complete Classic three days ago, Microsoft and PlayStation were an hour apart on the same day. Here they are identical, down to 14:00 UTC.

The other thing the paperwork preserves is the announcement itself. Microsoft's availability window for the purchasable sku opens at 2026-05-28T13:00:00Z and closes at 2026-10-13T13:59:59Z, one second before the game unlocks. PEGI's record for the game gives three pre-release dates, all 28/05/2026, one for each platform. The press release, the pre-order window and the ratings submission are all the same afternoon.

Dates move, and a publisher's plan three weeks out is a plan, not a fact about October.

The price, which for once is everywhere

The last upcoming game we looked at had a price in a press post and nowhere else. This one is the opposite. Frontier's release gives a suggested retail price of £39.99/$49.99/€49.99 for the standard edition and £54.99/$64.99/€64.99 for the Deluxe, and every storefront we can reach matches it exactly.

Ten figures across four storefronts and a press release, and not one of them disagrees. That is worth saying because it is rare, and because it means the pre-order price is a real number rather than an expectation.

Against the first game, the increase is five units of currency on the standard edition and ten or twelve on the Deluxe.

Neither game is discounted on Steam today. The gap between the standard and Deluxe editions is what actually widened: ten dollars on the original, fifteen on the sequel.

On console the comparison lands differently, because the original's console release is still on sale at full price two and a half years later. Microsoft's catalogue dates all three of those products to 2024-03-26T14:00:00Z.

A console buyer pays the same 49.99 USD for the sequel on launch day as for the two-and-a-half-year-old original this afternoon.

The PlayStation listing the obvious URL does not find

Frontier's announcement names PlayStation 5, and for a while that was the hardest half of the claim to stand up. The marketing slug playstation.com/en-us/games/planet-zoo-2/ returns 404 today, and the PlayStation Store search page serves a grid with no product rows in its HTML, because the grid is rendered by the browser rather than the server.

The listing does exist. The publisher's own buy page links to it by product id, and both the US and UK storefronts serve it:

store.playstation.com/en-us/product/EP2377-PPSA29934_00-PLANETZOO2000000

It carries the 13 October timestamp, a price, publisher FRONTIER DEVELOPMENTS PLC, the platform PS5, concept id 10015056, and a call to action of type PREORDER with a BUY_NOW action. The product id begins EP, the prefix for a European product, and the United States storefront serves that same European id rather than a UP-prefixed one of its own; only the sku suffix changes, U001 in the US and E001 in the UK.

The lesson we take from this is narrow and practical: a storefront slug that 404s proves nothing about whether a game is listed. Follow the publisher's own buy links before concluding anything about a platform.

Five Xbox products, two of which take money

Microsoft's catalogue holds five entries for this game, and only two of them can be bought.

A zero on a Microsoft listing can mean two different things, and here it means the harmless one. The press release explains the two packs: pre-ordering earns the Bonus Content Pack at launch, and the Deluxe Upgrade Pack is what the Deluxe Edition bundles on top of the base game. Neither is sold separately, so neither carries a price or a buy button, and their actions are the licensing and redemption ones rather than Purchase. The duplicate base entry is the same shape: same title, same developer, same 13 October timestamp, no price, redemption actions only.

This is the opposite of the Gothic II pattern, where the zero meant a listing that had not opened yet. The way to tell them apart is the action list, not the number.

Three ratings boards, three different directions

This is where the record stops agreeing with itself. All three boards have looked at both games, and they have moved three different ways.

The ESRB has not moved at all. Certificate 36682 covers Planet Zoo and certificate 41461 covers Planet Zoo 2. Same rating, E10+; same three descriptors, Crude Humor, Mild Blood and Mild Violence; same three platforms, Windows PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series. Exactly one field differs between the two certificates: the sequel adds In-Game Purchases to its interactive elements, where the original carries only Users Interact.

Germany has gone down. The USK holds six records for the franchise.

The original was rated from the age of 6, and the console edition carried the content note Schreckmomente, roughly "moments of fright". All three sequel builds are released without any age restriction under section 14 of the German youth protection act, with no content descriptor at all; the only note attached is the standard In-Game-Käufe advisory about buying things inside the game. Two other details are worth pulling out. Germany's board has a certificate for the PlayStation 5 build, which is independent corroboration of a platform that has no marketing page. And the publisher named on the 2024 console certificates is Sold Out Sales and Marketing, a distributor, not Frontier, which is a real difference from every other record here.

PEGI has published nothing, while stores display a 7. PEGI's database holds a full record for Planet Zoo: rated 3, suitable for all ages, content specific issues recorded as None, with release dates of 05/11/2019 for PC and 24/09/2024 for both consoles. Its record for Planet Zoo 2 has no age at all. It carries one descriptor, Pressure to play, and three pre-release dates of 28/05/2026, which is the submission rather than a classification.

Both storefronts nonetheless show a PEGI age for the sequel, and they do not quite show the same thing. Steam displays PEGI 7 with the descriptors Mild Violence and Pressure to Play; Microsoft's catalogue displays PEGI 7 with the descriptor Violence, plus the interactive element In-Game Purchases. Steam also prints the German certificate number 59049/26 next to its USK 0, which matches the USK's own database exactly, so the storefront is reading real records for one board and provisional ones for another.

If you are choosing for a child, the ESRB summary is the most concrete description anyone has published. It describes predators killing other animals when the wrong species share a habitat, staff shooting escaped animals with tranquilliser guns, small amounts of blood, meat and organs visible in feeding pens, and animals defecating and urinating with sound effects. That is what E10+ with Mild Blood is describing, and it has been true of this series since 2019.

Three dates for one console release, and none of them averaged

The original game's console launch has three defensible dates in the public record, depending on which body you ask.

These are not in conflict so much as they are three different things, but they are the sort of thing that gets flattened into one number elsewhere. We are printing all three and picking none. If you need the date the console version could first be bought, Microsoft's is the one that answers that question; the others answer different ones.

What Frontier has actually described

The announcement is specific about the new systems, and we are taking these as the publisher's claims rather than as facts about a finished game.

• Aquariums and aviaries, described as fully customisable habitats rather than placeable tanks, with scenery and location under the player's control. Aquariums need filtration and an airlock for staff; aviaries use support poles to generate habitat covers, and guests can walk through suitable ones.
• Aquatic and flying species, with black-tipped reef sharks, hawksbill turtles, shoals of fish, the toco toucan and the secretary bird named.
• Wildlife Reserves, conservation projects outside the zoo where animals are released into restored habitat.
• Animation and animal behaviour, described as a generational leap, with high-fidelity fur, feathers and scales, and brachiation named specifically. Brachiation is arm-over-arm swinging through branches, the way a gibbon moves.
• The Deluxe Upgrade Pack: six additional animal species and a selection of exclusive animal signs.
• The pre-order Bonus Content Pack: the Toucan Eat Shop and its signage, three unique animal donation bins, and the Tiger Photo Stand-In Wall.

Frontier's own site has kept up a weekly rhythm around these, with creature features on 27 August, 3 September and 17 September and a summit write-up on 10 September.

What is not known

• No species list. Six named animals and a count of six more in the Deluxe pack is the whole of the public roster three weeks out.
• No system requirements in anything we read today.
• No PEGI age, only a pre-release entry, while two storefronts display a 7 they got somewhere else.
• No PlayStation marketing page. The store listing takes pre-orders; the slug a reader would guess returns 404.
• No press kit. Frontier publishes press releases and no downloadable assets, so this article carries no images. That is a deliberate omission rather than an oversight.
• Nothing since May. Frontier's press centre lists the 28 May announcement as the only Planet Zoo 2 release on it, and the newest release of any kind there is dated 3 September, about a Disney collaboration.

Before the 13th

Three things are worth doing on the day rather than now. Check the price on your own storefront, because these are pre-order prices and nothing guarantees they survive contact with launch. Check the edition, since the Deluxe premium is five dollars wider than it was on the first game and the only stated difference is six animals and some signs. And if the In-Game Purchases line matters in your house, note that it is new: the ESRB did not attach it to the 2019 game and has attached it to this one, and all three German certificates carry the same advisory.

If you want the first game instead, it is 44.99 USD on Steam and 49.99 USD on Xbox today, undiscounted, and its own console release is covered by the dataset row below.

The row in the dataset

datasets/games.csv records Planet Zoo 2 with Frontier Developments as both developer and publisher, a first release of 13 October 2026, the platforms Windows PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, the genre Simulation, and the era upcoming. The platform list is the publisher's own and excludes Epic, which is a storefront rather than a platform, and excludes Nintendo hardware, which nothing in the record mentions. This is the twenty-third row in that file, and the sixth upcoming one; Gothic II Complete Classic is the row immediately above it, and the contrast between the two is the whole reason both are worth writing down.