It’s been an eventful few days for Xbox. Gears of War: E-Day was officially confirmed during the Xbox Games Showcase to be a console exclusive, hours after a PEGI rating for the PS5 version surfaced.
The declaration, which Xbox had to further clarify in post-show interviews, came after reports earlier that day suggested that platform leadership had made a last-minute decision to cancel the game for PS5.
But just as we thought the whole debacle had reached its natural conclusion, along comes a new piece of evidence to reignite the chatter all over again.
One day after the big Gears of War: E-Day blowout, a new episode of the Official Xbox Podcast was uploaded to the platform’s official channel on YouTube. The episode offers a deep dive into the upcoming game, featuring members of the development team. Quickly after it went live, however, the video was made private for the exact reason you might assume. That fumble was spotted by Resetera user Jessie.Bristol, who grabbed a screenshot from about halfway through the video showing the E-Day cover art with a PS5 logo.
The discovery added more fuel to the fire, lending credence to the reports that said the decision to lock E-Day to Xbox was made very recently, close enough to the Xbox Showcase that the team didn’t have time to change official materials to remove references to the PS5.
Xbox, however, has a way of explaining this. Aaron Greenberg, vice president of marketing at Xbox, chimed in on X to clarify that it was not a last-minute decision, it was simply one that only a few people within Xbox knew about.
“I can confirm this is not true. We just limited the knowledge of this news to a very small internal group,” Greenberg said in an X reply. “Intention was to share this news first with our players and everyone watching the showcase.”
If you’re curious when the decision was actually made, Greenberg revealed that he was “made aware of these exclusives” about a month ago.
Hopefully that will be the last we hear of this silly little saga forever. In case you missed it, inXile’s Clockwork Revolution is the other previously-thought-to-be-multiplatform game that will now be an Xbox console exclusive.
Gears of War: E-Day arrives 6th October for PC, and Xbox Series X/S. Clockwork Revolution has a nebulous 2027 release target.
