Microsoft job listing for Gears of War stokes the PlayStation release rumours

The Coalition is one of the first-party studios beneath Microsoft and Xbox. It has been responsible for Gears of War since Microsoft acquired the rights in 2014, and it also supported development on Halo: Infinite in 2021. Now, it’s gearing up for Gears of War: E-Day, and it’s very possible that PlayStation is going to be one of the recipient platforms.

As per a job posting (thank you, Cappuccino2000 on Reddit) for an unnamed Gears title on Microsoft’s official careers website, The Coalition is hiring for a Senior Online Client Engineer, and one of the required skills is “Experience with Xbox Live, PSN, Steam or other online gaming platforms.” The caveat here is that ‘or’ suggests that PlayStation network engineering experience isn’t necessarily required, though the specificity of the networking platforms hints otherwise.

Phil Spencer has been extremely vocal about bringing Xbox games to other platforms recently. Project Latitude is more than a strong rumour, and it’s likely that we will be seeing the likes of Halo on PlayStation at some point. With the above in-mind, the presence of PSN on a Microsoft job listing seems to suggest more than general experience, but specific.

According to Jeff Grubb (and thanks to VGC for bringing this to light) “the other one that I’ve head that’s definitely under consideration–it doesn’t mean it’s going to happen, but it’s in talks–is Gears of War.” If there was a franchise to bridge the gap between Green and Blue, it would probably be a Gears prequel (as E-Day is set to be.)

There has not been many Gears mainline game entries since The Coalition took the project under its wings. There was Gears 4 in 2016, and Gears 5 in 2019. It also released a spin-off title too, though E-Day looks as though it’s going to be the most ambitious project yet with the move over to Unreal Engine 5. To stick the landing even better, dropping it onto PlayStation would probably help a bunch.