Alinea称《Gears of War: E-Day》受Game Pass影响，72.2万提前购升级仅付30美元

The first data on Gears of War: E-Day sales is out, and it's not looking good at all for Vancouver-based developer The Coalition. The studio was already reported to be very worried they'd be next in line for the chopping block after the second chapter of Xbox's Big Reset, which moved Halo, World's Edge, and Rare under Activision and laid off many employees across the division.

Now, Alinea Analytics reports that the game has sold only 230K units across Xbox (console and PC app) and Steam, a meager result for a triple-A game that has been in development for many years with a massive budget. 168K units were sold on Steam, and only 62K on Xbox. Revenue-wise, things are actually a bit better than the unit sales figure would suggest, with Alinea reporting $37 million earned, and the Xbox platform brought home $26 million of that slice.

How is it possible, given the much lower sales? Because of Game Pass, of course. The data shows 1.7 million players accessing Gears of War: E-Day via Game Pass, and 722K of those actually spent $30 for the Premium Edition Game Pass upgrade, which allowed them to access the game on October 1 instead of October 6.

Alinea's Rhys Elliott points to Game Pass as the main culprit: if those 722K subscribers who paid $30 to unlock the game early had instead been forced to purchase the full game, they would have generated nearly $40 million in revenue, rather than $21.7 million.

There's no doubt that Game Pass has proven to be an utter failure (save for edge cases, like State of Decay) for Xbox, which is why even CEO Asha Sharma has now admitted that the subscription service caused a "free fall" in the division's balance sheet. The future of Xbox's biggest first-party titles, as evidenced by Call of Duty (Modern Warfare 4 won't be on Game Pass), is definitely out of the subscription service for their first year or so after release.

But that's only part of the Gears of War issue, I think. Despite E-Day's strong average review scores (although I didn't love it, and the average Steam score of 72% shows that the biggest PC community isn't excited for it, either), even if all those 722K turned into full-paying customers, the game still wouldn't have reached one million units sold yet.

This year alone, games like The Blood of Dawnwalker, Onimusha: Way of the Sword, PRAGMATA, Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve, and WARDOGS became million sellers way faster, and it's fair to assume their budgets were much less onerous, too. Back in June, insider Tom Henderson claimed that, according to his sources, the budget of Gears of War: E-Day was over $400 million. This remains unconfirmed, but even if it were just half of that, the game would have a very hard time recouping costs, let alone making a profit.

With several hundred employees left to cut from the 3,200 milestone set by Asha Sharma, The Coalition's future has never been so uncertain. The series itself might survive the studio, though, as shown just recently with 343 Industries/Halo Studios; besides, there's a Gears of War film adaptation directed by David Leitch on the way, and Xbox has just established the XP division dedicated to transmedia efforts. The saga originally created by Epic Games certainly has the potential to do well on the big (or small) screen, which might help keep it relevant in Microsoft's eyes.

About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.

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