Ah, yes. The good ol' Microsoft / Sony cert process. It's a bunch of red tape, mostly to prevent games / publishers that will hurt their brands. It's also probably about 30% of the time needed to ship the game.
Where you're dinged for that process for not using the Sony© Playstation 4™ DualShock Controller® "Officially Approved Imagery Guidelines", you need to re-package the entire game and wait for their approval. There's normally a "Day 1 Patch" - which means that when the game "goes gold", it's going out to customers soon after... without everything completely 'fixed' and approved, but enough of it is fixed to the point where they can say within reason, the developer has made good progress on these issues and will have them resolved or waived for good cause by the release date.
It's a needed evil from the days when all games were distributed physically.
Imagine if Pokemon Red / Blue had a bug in it that prevented the game from being completed and there was no resolution to the bug. That would be terrible, and mass recalls of carts would be expensive. Now we can stream patches that fix issues like this, and the process is relaxed... but mostly used as a form of quality control to separate those who are serious about launching a title, and those that aren't.
