No PC Gears of War yet
X360 only for now, but Allard wasn't talking rubbish.
Epic boss Mark Rein has countered Xbox 360 front man J Allard's assertion in a recent Eurogamer interview that Gears of War will be released on both the Microsoft console and the PC platform, however he has not ruled out the possibility of a Halo-style PC port further down the road.
"Gears of War is an Xbox 360 exclusive. We're developing it specifically to take advantage of the power and features of the console," Rein told Epic fan site BeyondUnreal. "All of the work on Gears between now and when we ship is toward creating the ultimate Xbox 360 game."
"Could we, in the future, adapt Gears for Windows just as Microsoft did with Halo? Sure we could and, as you can see from J Allard's comments, Microsoft is clearly cool with that idea. But we're a long way off from thinking about that."
Although J Allard's response to this website that Gears of War was "Xbox [360] and PC" had led to a lot of excitement, it's worth reminding ourselves that Allard did check himself by admitting "it might be on one before the other," before adding that it was "a little bit more of a game time decision".
Allard, who has been at the heart of Microsoft's promotional effort for Xbox 360 since just prior to E3, claimed in the same interview that it was not his company's goal to remove PC games from their heartland and reposition them exclusively on a Microsoft-owned platform - a commendable position if delivered upon, and one many have encouraged.
"Every decision we make is really focused on what the gamers want," he said during E3. "A ton of our gamers are dual gamers meaning that they have PC and console because they prefer some aspects of PC, especially in FPSs. Okay, should we really make Quake an exclusive that you can't play on PC."
Although interviewers gave him a rough ride over the company's treatment of Halo, which took more than a year to make it from Xbox to PC, Allard was adamant that Microsoft cared about gamers as a whole, and also said that he was "encouraged" rather than surprised by the quality of Sony's PlayStation 3 showing, adding, "I want gaming to get bigger!"
You can read the full Allard interview elsewhere on Eurogamer here.