Ubisoft announced today that I am Alive and Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon 4 will be pushed back to the publisher's fiscal year 2010-2011, or April 2010 at the earliest. The titles were previously scheduled for release in the company's fourth quarter, sometime prior to March 2010. This news came as a shock to many people as I am Alive had gained much interest after its showing at the end of E3 2008 (and was just recently taken away from its developers to be finished up internally at Ubisoft). Not to mention Ghost Recon 4, which Ubisoft oddly failed to recognize at this year's E3 whatsoever; fans are eagerly awaiting the next game in their favorite military series.
Additionally, Splinter Cell: ConViction, the long-awaited Xbox 360-exclusive return of Sam Fisher, will be missing the holiday 2009 line-up as well. ConViction, which was slated to arrive in the fall alongside Assassin's Creed 2, is now pegged for Q4 2009 - anywhere between January and the end of March 2010.
Said company president, Yves Guillemot, "We are disappointed that we have to postpone the release of several major games but we consider that this choice is the best one in the long-term interests of Ubisoft. Lastly, we are having to adjust our full-year targets to take into account the fall in business over the first half. The excellent response to our games at E3, as well as the high buzz generated for titles such as Assassin's Creed 2, Splinter Cell Conviction and Avatar, reinforce our belief that the company can achieve strong growth in the second half of the fiscal year."
[Update]: In a conference call this afternoon, Ubisoft further detailed the delay of ConViction. "The changes on Splinter Cell and Red Steel [2], it's just a question of polish. The team was asking that they couldn't be with the level of quality on all the maps and all the game for the end of the year, so they had asked for more time to be able to come with a better product, for both of those games. The quality of the games is there for what you've been able to see at E3, but we were not able to have that same quality on the full game of those two products."
"We still have the full support of Microsoft," he added, "because they know that if we can bring a very high-quality game this will help their machine. So we still have the full support from them." Ubisoft said that they expect the delay to cost them roughly a million units worth of sales, but believe they will make up for in the long term.
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