A new report says that ‘Gears of War: E-Day’ cost $500 million to make, which represents the absurd cost ballooning we have seen in the industry.
It is well-documented just how much the cost of video game development has risen in recent years, with ballooning budgets seemingly making AAA entries borderline unsustainable in some cases. Now, a new report claims that Xbox’s Gears of War: E-Day cost an astonishing amount of money to make, and as such, is likely a big hole for Xbox’s balance sheet.
A new Kotaku report says that Gears of War: E-Day cost $500 million to make. Development started in some capacity around six years ago in 2020. The game was made by The Coalition, which is based in Vancouver, British Columbia and is a studio with around 300 employees, not a cheap baseline start to begin with. This is not far off from previous estimates from Insider Gaming’s Tom Henderson, which put the cost at $400 million, something Windows Central’s Jez Corden pushed back against. But now this new figure is even higher.
Publishers and developers almost never publicly comment on the budgets of games for obvious reasons. Rather, we often only get information from places like insiders or leaks.
When Insomniac was hacked in 2023, it was revealed that Spider-Man 2, released that same year, cost around $315 million. In the last three years, with costs increasing even more, plus the nature of Gears itself, the $500 million number sounds plausible.
Sources with knowledge of the situation have also told me that the much-requested Destiny 3 could plausibly cost Sony as much as $500-600 million when all was said and done, given the current state of the industry. This $500 million mark for Gears is absolutely plausible. I have asked Microsoft for comment and will update if I hear back.
Gears of War: E-Day
Really, any amount in the hundreds of millions would lead to a poor showing for Gears of War: E-Day, thanks in part to both interest in the series in 2026, but also the Xbox release model. Alinea Analytics estimated that Gears sold just 230,000 copies in its first week and earned $37 million in revenue. That includes a large portion of that being $30 that Game Pass subscribers paid for early access.
But the game is a Day One launch on Game Pass, which leads to far fewer outright game purchases. E-Day was also made an Xbox console exclusive by Xbox CEO Asha Sharma in a big announcement earlier this year, part of a move to get Xbox to have more of its own first-party exclusives again, something long requested by fans. This does, of course, forgo any amount of PS5 sales there might have been, a platform which has a much higher install base. But even with that, it’s hard to imagine that this budget could have been any way justified for a game like this.
Game budgets have gotten out of control. Rockstar recently denied that Grand Theft Auto 6 cost $1.5 billion to make, but did not confirm it was under a billion. A hope in the industry now is that costs and production time can now be brought significantly down by increased use of AI tools, though the newest ones have only been implemented recently, and we have no context yet as to how much they might change the industry. At this point, something has to give.
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This article was originally published on Forbes.com