Just over a month before the planned November 19 release of the highly anticipated open-world techno-spying game Watch Dogs, publisher Ubisoft has announced that the title has been delayed to some time in the company's next fiscal year, which begins April 1, 2014. The Crew, a mission-based driving/crime game planned for next-generation consoles, has been similarly delayed from a planned "early 2014" release date into the next fiscal year.

"We are building franchises that will become perennial pillars of Ubisoft’s financial performance," Ubisoft co-founder and CEO Yves Guillemot wrote. "In a context of growing successes for mega-blockbusters, the additional time given to the development of our titles will allow them to fulfill their huge ambitions and thus offer players even more exceptional experiences."

The development team behind Watch Dogs went into more detail on the delay in a post on the Ubisoft blog. "We struggled with whether we would delay the game. But from the beginning, we have adopted the attitude that we will not compromise on quality," the statement reads in part. "As we got closer to release, as all the pieces of the puzzle were falling into place in our last push before completion, it became clear to us that we needed to take the extra time to polish and fine tune each detail so we can deliver a truly memorable and exceptional experience."

Watch Dogs' previous November release window (for the PC, PS3, PS4, Wii U, Xbox 360, and Xbox One) put it in a particularly busy section of the holiday release calendar, right between the November 15 release of the PlayStation 4 and the November 22 release of the Xbox One (and a bevy of launch titles for both systems). That's not to mention the new Mario and Zelda games coming to Nintendo platforms on November 22 and major releases like Battlefield 4, Call of Duty: Ghosts, and Ubisoft's own Assassin's Creed 4 that will see release in late October and early November (in fact, Ubisoft probably won't mind at all that Assassin's Creed and Watch Dogs will no longer be actively fighting for gamers' holiday-season open-world dollars).

Ubisoft is far from the first company to push a game back from an overcrowded holiday season. Many of the biggest games of early 2013 were originally slated for late 2012 release but were delayed to allow for more development time and less competition on store shelves.

Still, announcing such a long delay in such close proximity to a planned release date, and even closer to the "gold" date where a finished game would have to be sent out for pressing onto discs, is definitely out of the ordinary (though not unheard of: games like Rayman Legends, Alpha Protocol, and even Half-Life 2 saw similar late-stage delays). The game was even set to be bundled with certain PS4 launch packages; the fate of those bundles is very unclear at this point.

Pushing the game back so close to a planned release date heavily suggests massive, unignorable problems with the game as it exists currently, problems that couldn't be fixed in the limited time remaining. While Watch Dogs has seemed perfectly playable at conference demonstrations in recent months, those short, crafted experiences don't necessarily correlate with how well a complete game is coming together late in development.

In the long run, the delay is probably a good thing for everyone involved. As Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto famously quipped, "A delayed game is eventually good, a bad game is bad forever." Besides, as noted above, this holiday season is so jam-packed with big-name releases that players aren't likely to miss Watch Dogs all that much for the time being.