Can you hear that dear readers? It's the collective SIGH of the entire gaming community as two of this years highly expected releases, Red Steel 2 and Splinter Cell: Conviction have gotten pushed back to early next because, and we shit you not, they want to put a little "polish on the games."

Ok now Red Steel 2 we can't understand because we all know how bad we REALLY want that motion plus to work with real time rendering so that we can have an awesome first person shooting/swordplay game as we all know how the first Red Steel turned out. 

But Ubisoft, babe...pal...buddy...guy...friend....If we remember correctly wasn't Splinter Cell: Conviction originally slated for a NOVEMBER 2007 release?!?! How much more could you polish a game after that long of a delay? We'd better be able to see our reflection in this thing.

Now this all comes from CEO Yves Guillemot who when pressed about the delays having an effect on sales stated that "those two products, it's around a million units" of sales that are lost in the first month alone. However, Guillemot goes on to say "We really think with the level of quality that we'll be able to obtain with the time we give them we will have a long shelf life for those products."

Honestly, we don't believe that for a minute. Look at it this way, Ubisoft is a great company known for producing great end results in games but they're also a business. We believe that they've made this decision to push back the games in order to maximize profit based upon the lower amount of competition in first quarter 2010. It will also be right after the holiday and people will have an excess of holiday funds (i.e. - kids and teenagers who get money for Christmas) to purchase the games with. It also sets Ubisoft in a spot that they could have garnered great reviews on their games by the time the March and April lull in game releases hits luring in more potential customers.

Well played Ubisoft. This might just be a gamble that could pay off for both Ubisoft and gamers alike. Only time will tell.