Horrible timing. I am sorry to say, but talking about a day before the Sony event is not a good idea and this is coming from someone who's passionate about both consoles. Everyone will forget about this blog tomorrow. They should of posted this along with a July 1st party event or at least showed gameplay clip of Halo Infinite or a gameplay demo of some other 1st party game. Dumb marketing, dumb timing. Very sad. Still excited too see July event but this will not age well tomorrow.
I'll admit timing seems to be an issue recently. There were rumors Lockhart was going to be revealed this month and I never liked the sound of that tbh; had the May event went over massively well I'd of felt different but the problems with that event (mainly too little gameplay and AC Odyssey blue-balling everyone) plus the unanimous praise of the PS5 UE5 demo only a bit later would've made a Lockhart reveal in June a poor move since, again, not too much point in pushing more hardware without having a slam-dunk on the software to hook people in.
Sounds like they will talk more about XvA this month maybe, as a presser or such. Still though I agree they should really consider even just a small in-game gameplay snippet teaser of Halo Infinite or one of the other games in the July showcase to put out around the time of the PS5 event (maybe not same day, but a day or two later or week after). Given all the anticipation for tomorrow even if the games shown aren't overall quite what we were hoping for Sony's guaranteed to get a TON of good vibes from it and lots of marketing coverage.
MS already let them more or less shift the hardware discussion narrative to SSD I/O, I dunno if they want to have the games narrative shifted even moreso to the style of games Sony are generally known for, because different types of games will leverage these console technologies differently. Depending on what specific games are shown tomorrow it's going to seem like an incredibly steep climb for MS to get back in a position of relative prominence on next-gen messaging, when up until the Inside Xbox event I'd say they were leading on that (and yes that was partly due to Sony not showing or saying too much but a really strong Inside Xbox event would've more or less cemented them strongly; instead IMHO it kind of knocked their messaging down a couple of pegs even though I liked several of the games shown).
Yeah, they are still chasing Sony. This time trying to latch onto the UE5 reveal hype.
Its weird, SX seems like a strong hardware offering, yet their messaging is so desperate to horn in on topics Sony is starting. It seems really weak to me.
I'd say more recently it feels like they're being a bit more reactionary; again that Inside Xbox event seems to have been the point in the shift for me. They kind of are letting Sony control the narrative on more things now, when even with stuff like the SSD that could've been MS if they got out in front of it earlier and showed their solution in action to a point virtually perceived as instant and seamless with really strong asset streaming ahead of the UE5 demo (speaking of which they had to of had some kind of inkling about the demo and when it was going to drop, right?).
Then we've kind of seen it again in clarifying the "generations" thing, and responding to the UE5 demo by basically saying "yeah well we can use it too!", instead of trying to one-up them with an in-house solution (as some friendly jab at Epic along the way, maybe). That's kind of what they need to do to leverage a position of strength in the narrative because being reactive isn't going to see big gains for them. Basically they have to work twice as hard as Sony in terms of messaging for similar gains, at the moment it doesn't seem like they're doing that because such would mean them being more proactive in controlling/influencing the media narrative than they have been the past few weeks.