Xbox’s Mike Ybarra on Crackdown 3’s delay and future exclusives: ”the important thing is giving developers time to make a great game”

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While the Xbox One X will be Microsoft’s biggest release this year, it’s a bit short of high profile first party games. Especially now Crackdown 3’s release date had been delayed to 2018. 

Corporate Vice President of Xbox & Windows gaming platform, Mike Ybarra’s pretty clear though: “the most important thing is giving game developers enough time to make a great game” he says. “I’ll take a delay of a game over rushing something out over rushing it and then having to fix it and patch it over time.”

That’s an admirable sentiment, but it’s no secret that while there's plenty of third party games on the way (check out the full list of Xbox One X enhanced games, for example) most Xbox gamers want some exclusives and Crackdown 3 was a shining light in the future. 

However, its delay doesn’t worry Ybarra. “I feel incredibly proud of the line up we have from now through to December,” he counters when asked about the delay. “We have four console exclusives - Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds going to be a huge one, Cuphead, Lucky’s Tale, Forza Motorsport 7 and all of those are going to be big titles.” And as for next year? “Walking into early 2018 we have State of Decay 2, Crackdown 3,” he adds. “I feel like, from an exclusive standpoint, big triple A and diversity of games, [I’m] really happy with where we are on the games front.”

Leon Hurley
Leon Hurley
Managing editor for guides

I'm GamesRadar's Managing Editor for guides. I also write reviews, previews and features, largely about horror, action adventure, FPS and open world games. I previously worked on Kotaku, and the Official PlayStation Magazine and website.