Microsoft's Phil Spencer has said that this year's busy Q3 and 4 release window was behind the decision to bump Crackdown 3 once more.
Speaking to Eurogamer, the Microsoft games boss said that he wanted to give the game "the time to be right".
As well as the usual triple-A blockbusters like FIFA, Call of Duty, Battlefield and Assassin's Creed, there's the small matter of Red Dead Redemption 2 - a title that is surely going to have a big impact on the sales of other games launching in the same release window.
The irony of bumping Crackdown 3 is that now the super hero title is going up against a lot of games that are also trying to avoid Take-Two's cowboy romp.
"It's hard to move games," Spencer said.
"There's no doubt about that. It's expensive. You have to make sure the team has the energy for it, so it takes time to go and have all of the discussions, make sure you're saying you've got clear ownership and leadership in place for the important issues. But we made the decision we were going to move the game because we wanted to give it the time to be right."
He continued: "I also wanted to move it to a time where I thought it could be successful. Let's just say this fall is a little crowded, when you go through Call of Duty, Battlefield, Red Dead, Just Cause, Assassin's Creed. I wanted to make sure it had time to actually find an audience, where everybody just wasn't out playing another game.
"We landed on a spot where we can make a better game, and it'll be at a time where it has an opportunity to find an audience. It's hard though. It is financially expensive to extend it. But we did make sure we got the leadership straight in terms of how we're managing that and who the people are."
Additionally, Spencer personally took the fall for the game being pushed back.
"I might be partially to blame on this one," he said.
"I'm a huge fan of Crackdown. I played a lot of Crackdown 1. It's one of my favourite Xbox franchises. Earlier in the spring I got asked by somebody whether it was cancelled. I said no, the team has a date. They know the date and they're shooting for it, which was the date I had in my head. And then I started playing the game and it didn't feel right to me. I felt like the game needed more time to reach what I think of as Crackdown, which I think should be a strong Xbox franchise."
Crackdown 3 was announced at E3 2014 with three developers working on the project. The super hero title has been delayed repeatedly and now only Sumo Digital is working on the game.
