It’s a busy time for Xbox as the company is once again changing ways by bringing back exclusive games in the form of Gears of War: E-Day and Clockwork Revolution. And now it seems that in the midst of that chaos, Xbox may have pissed off Sony a bit.
In Jason Schreier’s Bloomberg report on June 10, the reporter revealed much of what Asha Sharma and Matt Booty were publishing as an open book. But one thing the Xbox duo didn’t say was that the trailer for Halo: Campaign Evolved would be at least the week of PlayStation State of Play, and it was released at the event.
“Sharma and his team also pulled a Hello trailer that was supposed to appear at the PlayStation event last week,” Schreier wrote.
This may be due to something that happened a few weeks ago. Matt Booty was a guest on the official Xbox podcast where he discussed staying open about what platforms their games will launch on. But a few days later, Asha Sharma retracted that based on fan feedback, and said that the company would stop displaying competitors’ logos during their shows.
However, if you watched the show, you’ll probably see that they showed the logos of the competitors, including the PS5 logo in the Halo: Campaign Evolved trailer.
This is not the first time we have heard of Halo being released at this event. Christopher Dring apparently stated in his Game Business newsletter that, “There was a rumor at Summer Game Fest that Xbox had planned to have the game at PlayStation’s State of Play show, but decided against it, much to Sony’s chagrin.”
The quote appeared on Resetera and was picked up by several other outlets, but I want to note that I can’t actually find this quote in the original article. It seems that part of the first section is still there, but the hint of gossip and the drawn game is gone. Maybe Dring decided to remove it since he has no hard evidence.
Tom Warren of The Verge then posted on social media, retweeting the trailer for Halo: Campaign Evolved taken from the PS5 Pro and saying that “it would make more sense if it was supposed to be part of Sony’s State of Play…”
Reb’s Gaming, a well-known insider when it comes to all things Halo, said the trailer was made for State of Play.
If it’s true and Xbox decided to pull the trailer, Sony would be really upset as it means they have to rearrange and rearrange parts of their show to account for the missing title. Depending on the length of time, they may be left with limited time to get replacements, too. While I doubt this will destroy the relationship between the two, it is still dangerous to upset business partners like that.
Apparently Sharma and co. They think it’s worth it as part of their big changes, though. They may release Halo on PS5 – and even future Halo games because they’ve publicly said that all future Halo titles will come to PlayStation – but that doesn’t mean they have to let the competition show.
Whatever happened, it seems like this was all last minute, similar to how Xbox seems to have made the decision to turn Gears of War: IE-Day into an Xbox exclusive at the last minute.
