'Titanfall' Release Date Nearing For Xbox One And PC: Microsoft Says Pre-load Offer Was A Mistake

Oops. Microsoft’s initial promise to Xbox One owners to download the first-person shooter ahead of launch was a mistake. The original page, which can no longer be found in the online Xbox store, promised users the ability to own the game digitally from Xbox Live before its March 11 release date.

The original page contained the following message:

"Xbox One game expected to release on March 11th, 2014. You will be charged the full price immediately for this pre-purchase. You may download the game from Xbox Live before then, but it will not be playable until after 12:01 AM PST on the release date in your country."

The page also showed the installation as a 15.88 GB download.

"We believe in digital distribution, and are proud to give gamers a variety of ways to purchase and experience their games,” an Xbox One representative told Polygon. “However, pre-purchase and pre-download for ‘Titanfall’ for Xbox One will not be available from Xbox Store. We'll continue to strike a balance between digital distribution and its benefits, while supporting physical games purchase through our retail partners,” The spokesperson also added "the pre-purchase offer page was posted in error. We apologize for any confusion."

“Titanfall’s” beta closed on Feb. 19. Around 2 million Xbox One and PC gamers participated. “The designers spent a lot of time watching videos and streams of people playing to try and look and see how they were abusing things or not understanding things,” Heppe told Polygon on Feb. 21. She added that “we had around 2 million unique users playing during the beta.” Microsoft's servers actually crashed on Feb. 14 for several hours due to heavy usage.

“As you can imagine, this will be a franchise that’s around for a long, long time. I think people will be very excited,” EA Chief Financial Officer Blake Jorgensen said at the Stifel Technology, Internet & Media Conference in San Francisco on Feb. 11. “The team’s very experienced -- they’re very experience on building a game and it’s only a single platform game, so it makes it less complicated. Doesn’t have as much multiplayer, it’s 12 multiplayer. It is 60 frames per second, so it is a beautiful game, but I believe that the team has done a great job, and we’re always trying to take lessons learned from previous issues and build them into the new game. You never know exactly what will happen when you start to run through all the gyrations that our consumers always run through, but we’re always there to make sure that it’s getting updated and robust over time and make sure that the consumer experience is fantastic.”

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