Dec 20, 2010 07:30 GMT  ·  By

The Spike TV Video Game Awards have come and gone, but even if we received a huge amount of trailers with all-new games, one of the scheduled announcements before the start of the event, concerning the Gears of War franchise, didn't appear.

Microsoft and Epic Games, the publisher and developer, respectively, of the third-person shooter series released a video before the VGAs, with franchise creator Cliff Bleszinski saying that an unexpected announcement would be revealed during the event one week ago.

Sadly, that hasn't happened, with the series being absent from the major reveals of that night.

Now, Bleszinski issued a formal statement about the missing announcement, saying that the company itself was hit with an unexpected delay, so it was best for the strategy of the franchise to just delay the whole thing.

"One thing I've learned in the world of video games; it's a war out there," he said, explaining the absence of the promised reveal.

"There's a lot of strategizing going on and at any point something may shift due to a strategic move that needs to happen. So I came out here potentially announcing something, it turns out the timing's not right."

It seems that Epic and/or Microsoft weren't exactly ready to unleash the big announcement, especially seeing as how Gears of War 3, the upcoming new release in the series, is still a long way from its release date next fall.

If rumors were to be believed, the two companies were preparing a special reveal, involving both Gears of War and the recently released Kinect motion control peripheral.

Microsoft's efforts to persuade hardcore Xbox 360 owners into buying the Kinect have fallen onto deaf ears, as only casual or family games were released for the new device.

As such, a Gears of War tie-in would've earned the Kinect some serious credibility.

It looks like we'll just have to wait and see when the big Gears announcement actually takes place.