Gears of War: E-Day reportedly draws over 1.7m Xbox Game Pass players and earns more than $37m since launch

Gears of War: E-Day has drawn around 1.7 million players through Xbox Game Pass and earned more than $37m (about £28m) in revenue since its launch, according to new estimates from Alinea Analytics’ Rhys Elliott.

The figures suggest that sales alone do not tell the full story of the shooter’s performance. A significant portion of the game’s income came from Game Pass subscribers who paid for a Premium Edition upgrade.

Elliott reports that Xbox has sold around 230,000 copies of Gears of War: E-Day since the prequel’s advance-access release at the start of October. Of those sales, 168,000 came from Steam and 62,000 from Xbox consoles and PC.

Game Pass appears to have shaped these numbers considerably, as has been common with many Xbox-published games this generation. Around 1.7 million players accessed the shooter through their subscription, while more than 722,000 of them also purchased the $30 Premium Edition upgrade.

Premium Edition owners who paid $99.99 were able to play early from October 1, but Game Pass subscribers could instead pay a cheaper $30 for the same edition and its add-on extras. The game then launched in full on October 6 for regular Game Pass subscribers and Standard Edition buyers.

Including pure sales, microtransactions, and Premium Edition upgrades, Gears of War: E-Day has apparently earned above $37m. According to Alinea Analytics, almost a million people paid something for the game.

“In a world without day-one Game Pass, many of these folks would have bought E-Day at $70.” The analyst speculated further: “They paid $30 for five days early access to something they don’t own. Xbox is, in effect, charging its most valuable customers the least, based on a hangover from a tried-and-exhausted strategy from a previous administration.”

Rhys Elliott, Alinea Analytics

Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has already stopped new Call of Duty games from launching directly into the subscription service. With significant change underway, blockbuster titles such as Gears of War or Forza may follow.

Player overlap figures reveal that on Xbox, more than 80% of E-Day players had previously tried another game, including a Gears title, Call of Duty, Fortnite, GTA 5 and Halo Infinite. On Steam, 72% of players came from Counter-Strike and 65% from Helldivers 2.

This overlap is perhaps unsurprising given how similar E-Day’s Horde Siege mode resembles Arrowhead’s PvE hit Helldivers 2. Both feature wide-open maps that draw players in multiple directions for side objectives and alien enemies.

The Coalition studio head Mike Crump recently claimed that E-Day is a “great foundation” for future sequels, promising the next Gears game won’t take nearly as long to make after the seven-year gap between entries. With the game now fully released, several people at the studio spoke to Eurogamer and feared post-launch layoffs could be on the horizon.

Eurogamer’s review of the game described it as “a game of contrasts: conservative by its very nature, but with enough technical proficiency and iterative thinking to make its old-fashioned ideas feel competent and engaging.” It added that bleeding-edge graphics with 20-year-old design sensibilities flow into a bloody crucible of familiarity that does nostalgia right.