We recently reported that Gears of War: E-Day wasn’t having the best launch week over on Steam, but according to Alinea Analytics’s Rhys Elliott, Steam doesn’t even account for half of the game’s revenue or owner base. The analytics firm estimates that Gears of War: E-Day sold around 230,000 copies since its launch, with around 168,000 of those copies coming from Steam and 62,000 of them coming from Xbox. Despite this, though, Xbox players still accounted for almost three quarters of the game’s $37 million in revenue.
The big differentiator here is that 1.7 million gamers played E-Day via an Xbox Game Pass subscription, and 722,000 subscribers paid an additional $30 for the Premium Edition Game Pass upgrade, which gave them early access to the game. The end result is that, even though few gamers actually bought Gears of War: E-Day, Xbox accounted for an estimated $26 million in revenue, where Steam only garnered $11 million.
