Week in Review: Gears of War: E-Day Storms Steam, Squadron 42 Finally Lands, and Everything Else You Missed

Gears of War: E-Day had the kind of week every Xbox team dreams about. The Coalition’s prequel launched on October 6, hit 31,517 concurrent players on Steam by October 10 (a record that tripled the series’ old high) per our Steam player data, and pulled what our analysts called the strongest Game Pass signal the platform has produced this year. By our count: 230,000 copies sold, 1.7 million Game Pass players in five days, and 722,000 paid Premium upgrades. We argued the $70 price tag is functionally gone for first-party Xbox, and our beginner’s guide and new crossplay explainer fill the gaps players are actually asking about.

Here is how the top five Steam launches of the past week stacked up against each other on concurrent players, by the numbers we track:

Squadron 42 finally has a Steam page, fourteen years after Chris Roberts first showed the game at a 2012 press event. The single-player wing of Star Citizen went live on Steam with wishlists open, and a Manchester attendee’s hands-off playtest write-up called the campaign “cinematic but on rails.” The Morning Save Point on Saturday did the math: announced 2012, wishlist 2026. That is a long road for a single-player game.

Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve became the fastest entry in the series to sell a million copies, per the Bandai Namco news we ran on October 9. It’s the cleanest “the audience came back” story of the month, and the only one that doesn’t come with a Game Pass asterisk.

Phasmophobia crossed 30 million sales on October 11 as the Crimson Eye Halloween event kicked off. Kinetic Games brought back eight of the maps players have been asking for with double XP, a Twitch Drop, and a $19.99 DLC. Eight years in Early Access, no sequel, no live-service churn, just Halloween every year.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 quietly launched its Dark Arisen expansion on October 9 across PS5, Xbox Series X|S, PC, and Switch 2. It’s a late-year surprise that gives Capcom’s open-world action RPG a real second wind before Monster Hunter Wilds hits Switch 2 in December.

Winners and losers of the week

Winners: Chris Roberts, who finally got a Squadron 42 Steam page out the door after fourteen years. The Coalition, who turned a $70 first-party Xbox launch into a million-player week without burning the Game Pass business model. Kinetic Games, who keep printing sales milestones out of a one-mode Early Access game by leaning hard into Halloween. Arc Raiders and Embark Studios, who turned a free weekend and a 6.2GB patch into a 7-month player-count high. And Bandai Namco, whose Ace Combat 8 is the rare modern series entry that actually over-performs.

Losers: The US console market, which hit new sales lows as PS5 and Xbox prices climbed to record highs in the same week. Ubisoft, who will shut down Rainbow Six Mobile on January 15, 2027, less than a year after its worldwide launch. Players who bought into Hytale’s Cursebreaker Edition, which promises free game copies for every chapter before 1.0, a deal whose value is entirely contingent on a game Hypixel has not shipped. And anyone holding out hope for a Hytale 1.0 release window, which is still nowhere on the calendar.

Surprises: EA is restoring Wing Commander 3 from 600 original FMV tapes it found in its own archives, with the remaster reveal at Portland Retro Gaming Expo including Mark Hamill and the original cast. Blumhouse and MatPat are turning Amanda the Adventurer into a movie and have more indie horror adaptations in the pipeline, which is a sentence I never expected to write in 2026. And Mike Ditka passed away at 86, which we marked with a look back at Mike Ditka Ultimate Football for the players who remember it.

Coming next week

The next seven days are stacked, with three dates worth circling. Here is the full week on one screen, drawn from our release calendar:

The full month lives in our October 2026 release calendar.

Most-read on Pixel Herald

The week’s top stories on the site, per our analytics, were led by Arc Raiders going on a tear after its Frozen Trail update and free weekend (170 views, the post of the week by a wide margin), followed by our Gears of War: E-Day Game Pass analysis (64 views), the E-Day beginner’s guide (9 views), the US console sales report (8 views), the E-Day 31K peak story (7 views), the MW4 PC system requirements guide (5 views), the Konami Silent Hill “second and third waves” story (5 views), and the Squadron 42 Manchester playtest write-up (5 views). The pattern: when we combine original data (our own player-count tracking) with a clear take, the post lands. When we hand you a launch with no angle, it doesn’t. Reddit drove 145 visitors to the site this week, by far the biggest outside source.

Our read: the gaming calendar is about to get loud. Modern Warfare 4, Castlevania, Planet Zoo 2, the first real Squadron 42 in over a decade, a Halloween event that just sold another 30 million Phantoms, and an indie horror movie pipeline. E-Day is the story of the week because it shows what a first-party Xbox launch looks like in 2026 when the storefronts finally line up. Gears on Xbox, Gears on Xbox on PC, Gears on Steam with crossplay, all day one, all in Game Pass, all $70 if you actually buy it, and a Premium upgrade track that 722,000 people paid for anyway. The Coalition basically ran the playbook the rest of the industry has been arguing about for two years, and the player count answers the question the discourse keeps asking: yes, this is what a $70 first-party launch looks like when every storefront is open and the subscription is right there. The US console market is still sliding in the background, but for one week, the biggest game on Steam is the one Microsoft shipped. Hold on to your backlog, because the next two months are louder than this one.

Edited by Kerwin Stewart, Editor-in-Chief · How we report