It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest. They probably had a flighting build ready to go for past few weeks but kept it from us just so they could show it off at E3 first.
Nothing wrong with marketing the product, but publicly estimating an April flighting plan and then waiting 2 months just for the sake of marketing is pretty lame.
What's even the point of promoting the port of a 2014 game (not even the full game, mind you) when they could be focusing on promoting Infinite?
I can assure that nothing going on with the MCC PC project is being driven by or dictated by marketing. Announcing back in March with months of inactivity is the opposite of what Marketing would've wanted. Ideally the entire announce would've just occurred at e3 if we knew then what we know now (just in terms of the pace at which things have been moving).
Flighting should begin rolling out to Insiders in June. But, it's highly likely that a representative work-in-progress flight-build slice of Reach PC will be on hand in Microsoft's booth at E3. We will talk more about this in the May update blog (coming either tomorrow or Thurs) and hopefully if the stars align, on a 343 social stream. If you like hearing in-flux transparent planning info read this (otherwise ignore and pretend it doesn't exist): (this is one of those examples where I'm being transparent telling you that I've got intent to do a Reach PC first look stream tomorrow but it could change, it's hour by hour at this rate as the QA team is validating the latest build.)
As someone who was googling 'Halo 3 PC' back in 2007, thank you for bringing MCC to PC, and for putting up with the impatient members of the community.
Nah I wouldn't say anyone is being unrealistically impatient - we've all waited a long time for Halo proper to be delivered to PC. This is a long time in the making and honestly I'm as eager and as excited as the community at large. Waiting is indeed the hardest part - well, waiting and also ensuring we live up to the sky high expectations (that seem to be growing by the day!). To say there's a lot of pressure on the team would be a huge understatement.
It's actually very relieving to know that marketing isn't dictating flighting schedules. I'd hate to see the project put on hold or rushed just to meet a hard deadline of E3.
We all aligned very early on that MCC of PC would be quality driven, not date driven and it wouldn't ship until it was ready. We also all agreed from the top down that flighting would be a critical path of development and we'd never leverage flighting as a marketing activation or turn it into any kind of pre-order incentive or customer 'bonus.' Really a lot of props go to the studio leadership and our partners across marketing for supporting the team's desire to do what's right for the project and players!
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