An official Xbox podcast has accidentally proven that Gears Of War: E-Day was meant to come to PlayStation 5, but Microsoft insists otherwise.
After pivoting to multiplatform releases for its core franchises, including Forza Horizon and Halo, Xbox’s recent showcase saw the company announce it was pivoting back to console exclusives (sort of), starting with Gears Of War: E-Day this year.
Although never explicitly confirmed, it was widely believed E-Day would come to PlayStation 5, especially when the original Gears Of War (which E-Day is a prequel to) saw a PlayStation 5 remaster last year.
Combined with how a PlayStation 5 listing for E-Day was spotted on the PEGI ratings board (which has since been updated to remove it), there are suspicions that this pivot was very last minute… and now there’s further evidence to suggest this.
In the wake of the showcase, an official Xbox podcast discussing Gears Of War: E-Day was uploaded to YouTube, and it included a slide from the end of the new trailer that shows its October 6 release date.
Instead of it saying that the game is an Xbox console exclusive the slide includes logos for Steam… and the PlayStation 5. The video has since been marked private and can’t be viewed, but it confirms E-Day was being considered for a PlayStation 5 release.
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When The Verge’s Tom Warren highlighted this, suggesting it was proof that Xbox exclusivity was a last minute decision, Xbox’s vice president of games marketing, Aaron Greenberg chimed in to deny this.
‘We just limited the knowledge of this news to a very small internal group. Intention was to share this news first with our players and everyone watching [the] showcase,’ Greenberg wrote on X.
When pressed on when exactly the decision was made, Greenberg only answered with, ‘A lot has changed since Asha came into role 107 days ago. We are moving fast and it’s frankly pretty energising inside the hallways here. I was made aware of these exclusives roughly a month in advance.’
So, it remains unclear exactly when it was decided to keep E-Day locked to Xbox, but even if the plan was to keep this info restricted to a small group, you’d think that would include whoever was in charge of adding that slide to the podcast video so as not to publicise outdated info.
If anything, this further highlights that despite how confidently Xbox’s chief content officer Matt Booty explained the company’s exclusivity plans, they still make little sense.
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In an interview with The Game Business, Xbox’s chief strategy officer Matthew Ball acknowledged the new strategy is confusing, promising things will be better explained in the future.
He also reiterated what Booty said about how big first party games, like Gears Of War and Clockwork Revolution, will be exclusives while live service multiplayer games, like Call Of Duty, will remain multiplatform… except Gears OF War: E-Day also has multiplayer, both co-op and competitive, and is locked to Xbox.
Additionally, newly announced first party games like Senua and Spyro: A Realm Beyond are scheduled as multiplatform releases. When pressed on why Clockwork Revolution is Xbox only and not Senua, Ball simply refused to comment.
Elsewhere, Ball mentioned that ‘A lot of people are complaining about lack of supply of Xboxes’ and ‘I can tell you definitively, demand for our console exceeds supply’ in relation to the ongoing memory shortage and increasingly expensive RAM prices.
While the Xbox does stand to be impacted, along with every other gaming console, it’s difficult to believe that there’s a serious shortage when Xbox’s big problem for years is that nobody is buying its consoles.
There was reportedly a small bump in the UK thanks to the launch of Forza Horizon 6 last month, which does show that even timed exclusives can help, but it’s hardly facing stock shortages when you can still easily buy one from retailers like Argos and Amazon, as well as Microsoft’s own storefront.
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