Epic Games and Microsoft have announced that the next sequel to their popular Xbox-exclusive shooter franchise, Gears of War 3 has been delayed, with the release date being pushed back from the previous April 2011 window until "Fall 2011" (Australian Spring 2011).

The teams at Microsoft Game Studios and Epic Games have done great work thus far readying the title for release in the spring of 2011. However, we’ve elected to move the launch of Gears of War 3 until fall 2011 to make it the marquee title for the holiday season."

Here's what Epic's Rod Ferguson had to say about the slip:

"I know fans are going to be disappointed with the new release date, but rest assured that this is a business decision between partners, and not a quality issue. Gears 3 was on track to be the most polished Gears of War game ever when it released in April, and this additional time allows us to polish it that much more before it hits shelves next fall. Next week we have a major multiplayer press visit at Epic HQ, and I'm really looking forward to the fans seeing and hearing about Gears 3 versus multiplayer for the first time. Lots more exciting news to come."

With Halo: Reach now out the door and Microsoft's only other high-profile, currently revealed core-gamer orientated title, Fable 3 due out in a few weeks, aside from the more casual Kinect line-up they won't really have much else exclusive left to promote next holiday season. So it stands to reason they'd want to move Gears to that period.

Let's hope we hear some big new reveals from MS in the coming months.

Epic's other studios are still hard at work on titles for other platforms with People Can Fly readying for a Feb 2011 PC/X360/PS3 of Bulletstorm, and Chair Entertainment (Shadow Complex) working on a yet-to-be-titled iOS game codenamed Project Sword that will use the Unreal Engine tech recently previewed in the Epic Citadel app.