The week’s loudest gaming argument moved from spreadsheets to lore overnight. Industry data says the flagship Xbox exclusive sold a fraction of what 1.7 million Game Pass players experienced, and the fight over what that means is only getting louder. Around that, a Modern Warfare 4 mode goes live in two weeks, Star Wars Zero Company hit a meaningful number, and Valve’s experimental MOBA broke its own Steam record. Here’s the Saturday brief.
The big one
Analyst Rhys Elliott at Alinea Analytics says Gears of War: E-Day sold an estimated 230,000 copies in its first week. The split is 168,000 on Steam and just 62,000 across Xbox console and PC. The same data points to 1.7 million players reaching the game through Game Pass, with 722,000 of them paying $30 for the Premium Edition to unlock five days of early access. Xbox-side revenue lands at about $27 million, and total earnings come in around $37 million. Microsoft has not confirmed any of the numbers, and Elliott himself flags them as estimates, not audited sales.
“While E-Day is a sublime game (it’s made my top 10), these are soft numbers for a flagship when Xbox badly needs revenue wins,” Elliott wrote. “E-Day sold 62K copies on Xbox against 722K Premium upgrades, so for every one copy sold on Xbox, nearly 12 Game Pass upgrades were sold. The $70 premium SKU is, functionally, dead on Xbox.”
The framing is the same one that showed up in the 2023 Activision Blizzard merger filings, which acknowledged that day-one Game Pass adds tend to eat into base sales. Our read: the interesting question is no longer whether Game Pass cannibalizes copies, but whether Microsoft decides that 1.7 million Game Pass plays count as a hit even when the receipts look thin. We already dug into what the E-Day split means for the wider Game Pass argument on Friday.
Also happening
- MW4’s DMZ mode goes live October 20 for anyone who pre-orders, with the campaign’s early access opening two days earlier on October 16. Activision dropped the official deep-dive on Xbox Wire, and we walked through what’s in the MW4 launch rollout on Thursday.
- The US console market hasn’t been this soft “since the early 80s.” Mat Piscatella’s warning is the new data point in a year that already had Sony and Microsoft pushing hardware prices to record highs, and it lines up with the sales breakdown we ran on Thursday.
- Star Wars Zero Company crossed one million copies sold, EA confirmed on its official channels, and lead studio Bit Reactor has started bringing furloughed staff back. Version 1.2 of the strategy game is also due next week.
- Valve’s Deadlock hit a new all-time Steam peak with the arrival of Solomon, a chess-hustler hero who can promote teammates to knight pieces and slide them across the map. PCGamesN notes the experimental MOBA is now ahead of Team Fortress 2’s all-time peak, and it’s still invite-only.
- Arc Raiders’ PvE mode could split the playerbase “very possibly,” executive producer Magnus Troedsson told Eurogamer. The team is still working out how to run the two modes in parallel without breaking the extraction loop.
Out today
A light Saturday on the release calendar. Banchou Tactics: Lion Heart lands on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S as a turn-based brawler RPG, Bar Keeper opens for PC players who want a low-key pub sim, and Lord Liberty Quest II: Pure White continues its small-RPG streak on PC. Nothing here is the morning’s centerpiece, so this is a fine day to clear the deck on something from the backlog.
Deal of the day
Out of Sight is free on the Epic Games Store until October 15. The atmospheric second-person puzzle adventure sits at an 80 on Metacritic, and the Epic window is the cheapest way to find out what all the quiet talk at the start of the year was about. If you miss it, the store’s next rotation swaps in Bad Cheese and Agent A: A Puzzle in Disguise on October 15, also free. Steam is also giving away the cult puzzle game Pony Island through October 12, if you’d rather skip the launcher switch.
One more thing
In the kind of crossover only 2026 can produce, Persona 3’s Aigis is joining Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds in 2027. Atlus confirmed the Year 2 DLC pack on its official X account, and the move is a quick reminder that the broader Sonic Racing Year 2 lineup is stacking Evangelion, Hello Kitty, and Persona 3’s gun-toting android in the same bumper crossover season. Yes, the android is now a kart racer. No, we are not going to be normal about it.
Edited by Kerwin Stewart, Editor-in-Chief · How we report
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