Teams needed more time to deliver quality games throughout the entire experience.

Splinter Cell: Conviction screenshot

Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot has said the reason for delaying the release of Splinter Cell: Conviction and Red Steel 2 was all about ensuring the final games are of a high quality.

Yesterday Ubisoft announced that the two titles would miss their planned holiday release dates, instead making their way into stores at some point between January 1 and March 31, 2010.

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"The changes on Splinter Cell and Red Steel – 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,” Guillemot explained during a post-earning conference call. “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.”

The delayed releases will have a dramatic impact on each game's expected short-term sales, with Guillemot stating that for "those two products, it's around a million units" of lost sales in the first month.

However, in the longer term Guillemot believes the decision to allow extra development time will pay off.

“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," he said. "Now, because [Splinter Cell: Conviction and Red Steel 2] are launching during that quarter, they will not do as many units for the first month as they would have done in November/December, but we think that on the long-term they can achieve more units than what they would've done."

Via Joystiq