MS made all that noise last year with Tomb Raider, and now instead of advertising a game that's exclusive to them (for the time being), they pull another butthurt move because the shoe is on the other foot this gen.

Great business strategy. 

I actually agree with this. They essentially let Tomb Raider out to die. As they did with Sunset Overdrive(releasing it with all the huge AAA titles with little promotion). I do not see a sequel for Rise of the Tomb Raider being made after this. It didn't do well on X1, might sell a decent amount on PC and PS4 but Square were expecting 6 million in the first month of the original game's release!!! This one won't get that lifetime.

"it was just a way to say"
It's the way I'm refering to. It's this way of advertising the game's presence on Xbox that the deal is supposed to prevent. I'm not saying that Xbox or EA aren't supposed to acknowledge that the game will come to Xbox. They have mentioned it on numerous occasions in interviews and PR and such. But the deal for the marketing rights prevents Microsoft from advertising Battlefront in various media such as commercials, magazines and newspapers.

And part of the reason is to pretend that it's an exclusive. People like you and I who frequent gaming sites obviously know that it's not. But a large amount of people who buy games and consoles don't do further research online after they see an advertisement for a game. They are also the least likely to hesitate on buying the games day 1/pre-ordering because they don't read up on potential launch issues like we do. And then they will recommend their version to their friends, so that they can play together, etc. We're talking about people who don't even notice that you can get a free game with your PS4 purchase, (which they can sell if they don't like it) and kept buying the standalone version in droves, making it chart higher than the other SKU's at Amazon for a long time, until Amazon discontinued the standalone version. (People still buy it though from second hand sellers, and it got into the top 100 again last month...) Or parents looking for a gift to buy for their kids, and see the PS4 Star Wars bundle advertised, but not an Xbox bundle. If Microsoft puts up an "Also available on Xbox One" sign next to the Battlefront advertisement, that would defeat the purpose of the deal in this instance. And another part of it is of course brand association.

The bottom line is that this is the kind of advertising that Sony paid to get exclusive rights for. So there is a good reason for it. MS are finding loopholes to still be able to advertise like this in magazines. In this case it's making an ambiguous statement on a separate page, that just happens to be right next to the Star Wars add. This will probably be ammended into the next marketing rights contract, like the circumstances of the Destiny perfume add attempt probably were. But both MS and Sony have had these kind of deals in the past, and to my recollection they weren't trying to undermine these agreements before.

And thats just sad cause TR is amazing, lets be honest here (ppl will go batshit crazy at me but I dont care) its a much superior game to both Halo 5 and Fallout 4 (I didnt play Batlefront but I hazard a guess it is as well), too bad both Halo and fallout are much more popular.

Everyone claiming exclusive marketing is bad and whatnot, you do realise that without this deals Sony and Ms would put way less money into advertising anythign right ? The cost would fall on the devs and that would elevate production costs wich would just be bad as a whole, exclusive marketing deals allow devs to spend mor eon theyre games cause Sony or MS are gona take care of the publicity, theyre awesome deals and Im realy happy they exist.

Now Im not 100% sure about how they work legaly but MS very deliberatly put that add on that page with that exact wording, depending on how these contracts go this could very well be indeed illegal, altough I dont think Sony cares much about 1 newspaper on London.

Thats Crystal Dinamics and Squares fault, they released on the worst time of the year with MS focused on marketting Halo and Fallout and with playstation not releasing Uncharted wich would make ppl remember TR was MS's Uncharted, also they let out that you could pre-order TR for PS4 even befor elaunching for XOne wich both affected sales of the game and likely made MS angry and less prone to properly advertise the game since they were already advertising Halo anyway. TR only purpose was to add to a list so MS could say they had "the best line up in Xbox history". They should have delayed this game to January or February a time slot that dont have many games and MS would actualy pay atention to the game and market it. This TR deal has gota be the worst in videogaming story, MS had almost no return from it, CD and Square lost millions of sales and the fanbase got both the shaft and very angry wich only served to harm the brand.

Maybe Sony should invest money in their first party line-up instead.