With E3 being less than a month away the gaming industry should typically be quiet, waiting patiently to unveil their projects on gaming’s biggest stage. Although in the past week, this hasn’t been the case for Microsoft.

Instead of having massive announcements at their press conference they’ve decided to reveal some of their latest projects through press releases. Such as the Xbox One without Kinect and the Games With Gold service improving. With no price drop on the horizon for Sony or Nintendo’s consoles, these announcements could have been big highlights at this years E3. Instead, Microsoft chose to reduce these announcements to stories that we see on websites, rather than save them for a boisterous and loud press conference event.

Now the question to be asked is why? Lets try and figure that out.

They want E3 to focus on games

Microsoft, along with many other companies have had some pretty dark times at E3. From Kinectimals to excessive amounts of entertainment services, Microsoft has failed to realize that E3 is about the games. With the recent announcements it seems as though Microsoft is starting to understand what people want. Right now we know of several big, flagpole exclusives that will be coming to the Xbox One. Those include Sunset Overdrive, Quantum Break, Fable Legends, Fantasia: Music Evolved and Halo 5. We’re bound to see demos and extended looks of all these games and that’s just the ones that have been announced. Microsoft should have a few more tricks up their sleeve like the next Gears of War or possibly a new third party exclusive. And those are just the games that are exclusive to the Xbox One, we should expect to see different game demos and announcements from third party studios during the press conference.

In addition the choices of games from Microsoft is something we’ve never seen before. Microsoft is infamous for having the typical bro-shooter exclusive like Halo, Gears of War and nothing else. Although these games will be on the Xbox One at some point we’re getting more interesting and fresh exclusives that we’ve never seen on a Microsoft console.

All of this is extremely plausible as Microsoft’s new head of Xbox Phil Spencer has said multiple times that there running out of time to fill in everything that they have planned and this press conference will be focusing on games. Although this one event should be exciting for everyone it’s also most likely apart of a bigger plan that Microsoft is trying to achieve and that is their messaging of the product.

They want their messaging perfect

Coming off of E3 2013 Microsoft was a mess. At the time their console was always online, had a massive focus on T.V. and other forms of entertainment and just had a general neglect for what people were asking for. Sony made matters even worse by presenting their console as a games first device and being $100 cheaper didn’t hurt either. Then things changed. Less than two weeks later Microsoft changed all of this. No more always online component, people could trade in and buy used games and much, much more. This marked a change for the console manufacturer and marked a light at the end tunnel that was the Xbox One before and during E3. Although all these changes were made it hasn’t made much of a difference in the consoles messaging. At the end of the day people still have bad blood towards Microsoft’s new product.

Now, with E3 on the horizon Microsoft has the opportunity to change the negative perception that has dawned on the Xbox One since the beginning. With E3 being gaming’s biggest stage Microsoft can focus their message on what people want to see, that being games. Not only will the dedicated audience recognize this but a more casual audience will recognize this since E3 is the place where more mainstream outlets like USA Today and The New York Times cover the gaming industry, opening games to a much broader audience. With their marketing being perfect Microsoft can finally look to catch up to the massive PS4 sales.

They have too many games

Microsoft has five announced flagpole exclusives and there are bound to be a few surprises. That’s a lot of games. Typically, for Microsoft they usually have two or three exclusives at most during any given year, and there’s also no guarantee that those are big, triple A games. With these recent announcements regarding Xbox Live and the console itself it could be because they simply will not have enough time to cover everything in a two hour press conference.

This is also evident with the recent reveal of Sunset Overdrive. Instead of saving the news for E3, Microsoft decided to show it to everyone early. They could have done this because they wanted to give the fans a piece of news early but that’s unlikely. At the end of the day Microsoft is a business looking to make the most money possible. The most likely reasoning are two things: either they have too many games to show us or they wanted Sunset Overdrive to have it’s own day instead of possibly being forgotten in the midst of other games they are showing. Although after seeing the game, that looks implausible. The more logical explanation is that they don’t have enough time to show Sunset Overdrive in full capacity in addition to the other games.

Whether or not E3 will be amazing or terrible, Microsoft looks to be going in the direction that they should have started in last year. And with all these rumors, speculation and anticipation one things for sure. It’s going to be an exciting E3 for everyone involved. What do you guys think? Sound off in the comments below.