Recently, analysts estimated that Gears of War: E-Day had earned around $42 million in revenue in its first week on the market, but a recent report from Kotaku claims that that revenue is but a drop in the bucket compared to the game’s overall budget.
[Editor’s note: Our in-depth review of Gears of War: E-Day is now live]
The report cites an insider “familiar with Xbox’s business” and claims that the production budget alone—that is to say, excluding the marketing costs—for Gears of War: E-Day was over $500 million. This puts the game’s overall estimated revenue at well under 10% of what Microsoft spent to get it out of the door, and, in a report from early October, employees at The Coalition, the Xbox Game Studios subsidiary responsible for the game’s development, said that they were concerned about being laid off shortly after the game launched, especially given the ongoing Xbox Reset and the current climate in the gaming industry overall.
The ongoing tumult at Xbox makes it difficult to judge what the fallout will be if E-Day doesn’t meet its targets—a situation that is made all the more complicated by Xbox’s recent push for Game Pass subscriptions and its late pivot towards Gears of War: E-Day as an Xbox-exclusive game. In the recent analytics data, it was revealed that Game Pass subscribers were responsible for around 74.6% of Gears of War: E-Day’s revenue, with over 1.7 million players accessing it via the Game Pass subscription, and it may turn out that some of the new subscribers that came to Game Pass for E-Day could stay in the long-term.