Evolve developer Turtle Rock and publisher Take-Two Interactive have confirmed that Evolve will not make its originally scheduled October 21st launch date. Instead it has been decided that the game will be pushed back till February 2015.

The decision to move to push the release date of the title back is to give Turtle Rock additional time to polish the game to make sure that it arrives in its absolute optimal state when it is released, according to Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick. In addition Zelnick indicated that he thinks that the new February release puts the game in an ideal release window to take advantage of all of the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 consoles that will be sold over the holiday season.

The news is actually rather surprising as it is the second major multiplayer shooter that has been delayed into 2015 to allow the developers extra time to polish and improve the game prior to release. The first of these that was also expect to arrive later this year was Battlefield: Hardline, which has now been pushed into 2015 as well.

What is perhaps more interesting is that we have seen several high profile titles that were schedule for Xbox One and PlayStation 4 releases this fall moved to 2015. This is reducing the number of titles that we can expect this holiday season. It remains of course to be seen on how much of an impact this will have on the sales of the next-generation consoles. It could be that players may decide to hang on to their current systems a bit longer if more titles are push into next year.