Gears of War: E-Day sales topped 230,000 across Xbox and Steam following an October 1 launch, according to estimates from analyst firm Alinea.
Market analysis head Rhys Elliott reports the Xbox player base is larger than it appears, even if premium sales were dominated by Steam. An estimated 62,000 people bought the game outright on Xbox consoles, with 168,000 buyers on Steam.
SteamDB ownership estimates, which are always fallible and are especially volatile shortly after launch, support this figure, estimating 171,000 to 195,000 owners at the time of writing.
How did a new, highly rated entry in a flagship series sell just 62,000 copies on Xbox in launch week? (Our Gears of War: E-Day review also awards it high marks.) Elliott notes that while Xbox Game Pass is “cannibalising much of the premium revenue,” with some 1.7 million estimated players playing E-Day through the subscription service, over 722,000 Game Pass subs also paid for E-Day’s premium upgrade.
“So ‘230K copies’ undersells the paying audience,” Elliott writes. “Including the 722K upgrades, nearly 950K people actually paid something for E-Day.” This brings the game’s total estimated sales revenue to around $37 million.
Nevertheless, “The $70 premium SKU is – functionally – dead on Xbox,” Elliott argues.
I’ve reached out to Microsoft for comment on these figures, which remain unconfirmed estimates, and its expectations for E-Day.
As Circana games analyst Mat Piscatella points out online (not in direct response to Alinea’s report, but certainly in its orbit), “it isn’t straight cannibalism if a person paying for Game Pass plays an offered game through the service.”
Many game developers, including several who’ve worked with or under Microsoft, have criticized the effects Game Pass can have on full-fat sales or the value of games. This year, Microsoft removed new Call of Duty games from the service’s day-one offerings, though it stopped short of admitting it was losing too much money on the deal as Game Pass growth failed to meet expectations despite a significant bump from CoD.
However, the assumption that, in a world without Xbox Game Pass, the sales of games like Gears of War: E-Day would be directly boosted by however large their Game Pass audience was doesn’t hold up.
“Not every person who plays a game via a sub service would buy that game were it not included in that service,” Piscatella notes. We don’t, and can’t, know exactly how many Game Pass players, or even Game Pass premium upgraders, would’ve paid full price in this case, but it certainly wouldn’t be all of them. We also can’t separate the value of any Game Pass subscriptions purchased by people enticed by E-Day – that is, the value-add.
E-Day was once on track to become another multiplatform Xbox game before Microsoft shelved a reportedly near-finished PS5 port to prioritize its home console, even if that means limiting its audience.