Gears of War: E-Day’s sales are reportedly lighter than you might expect from one of Xbox’s flagship names, but pure sales numbers don’t paint a complete picture of the bloody shooter’s performance. A sizable chunk of revenue actually came from Game Pass subscribers paying for the game’s Premium Edition upgrade.<\/p>\n
That’s according to new estimates from Alinea Analytics’ Rhys Elliott, which reports Xbox has sold around 230,000 copies of Gears of War: E-Day since the prequel’s advance-access release at the very beginning of the month – with 168,000 of those sales coming from Steam and 62,000 coming from Xbox consoles and PC.<\/p>\n
Game Pass seemingly affected those stats to a large extent, like many other Xbox-published games this generation. Around 1.7m Locust-grinders played the shooter through their Game Pass subscription and more than 722,000 of them also bought the game’s $30 Premium Edition upgrade.<\/p>\n
You see, owners of the Premium Edition that costs $99.99 were allowed to fend off the hordes early – from the 1st of October – but Game Pass subscribers could and still can drop a cheaper $30 for the Premium Edition upgrade and all its add-on extras. E-Day then launched in full for regular Game Pass subscribers and Standard Edition buyers on 6th October.<\/p>\n
When you include pure sales, microtransactions and those Premium Edition upgrades, Gears of War: E-Day has seemingly made above $37m (about \u00a328m). As Alinea noted, almost a million people paid something for E-Day.<\/p>\n
“In a world without day-one Game Pass, many of these folks would have bought E-Day at $70,” the analyst speculated. “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.”<\/p>\n
Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has already stopped new Call of Duty games from launching directly into the subscription service<\/a>. With so much change afoot, it’s not hard to imagine blockbuster games like Gears of War or Forza following suit.<\/p>\n Another interesting tidbit comes from player overlap. On Xbox, more than 80% of E-Day players previously tried another Gears game, Call of Duty, Fortnite<\/a>, GTA 5<\/a> and Halo Infinite<\/a>. On Steam, 72% of players came from Counter-Strike and 65% of folks came from Helldivers 2<\/a>, which is probably unsurprising when you think about how similar E-Day’s Horde Siege mode is to Arrowhead’s PvE smash hit. Both have wide-open maps pulling you in all directions for side objectives and bug-like aliens to tear into chunks.<\/p>\n The Coalition studio head Mike Crump recently claimed that E-Day is a “great foundation” for future sequels, and promised the next Gears won’t “take nearly as long” to make<\/a> after the seven-year gap between entries. With the game fully emerged, all eyes now turn to The Coalition – several people at the studio spoke to Eurogamer and feared post-launch layoffs could be on the horizon<\/a>.<\/p>\n