Gears of War: E-Day, the origin story of the long-running Gears of War franchise, launched on Steam, Xbox, and Game Pass, and, although Microsoft has been building hype for the new Gears game for several months leading up to launch day, the game’s launch performance on Steam is less than stellar. According to SteamDB, E-Day peaked at a somewhat underwhelming 31,517 concurrent players on Steam, although there’s a strong chance much of its player base is playing the game via Game Pass or on the Xbox Series consoles. To be fair, the game launched in the middle of the week, so we may see an upward trend in player counts over launch weekend.
Reviews for Gears of War: E-Day have also been lukewarm, with Steam’s Review rating reporting that only 74% of reviews on the platform are positive. On its own, that score isn’t terrible, but the negative reviews seem to stem from issues with stability and gameplay and the plot. Some of the reviews complained about frequent crashes on PC, while many long-time fans seem to have had issues with what they refer to a misleading marketing that advertised a return to old characters from the series, only for those characters to be replaced early on. There are also complaints about the multiplayer gameplay missing features, like custom lobbies and meat shields.