Gears of War: E-Day has sold about 230,000 copies since early access opened on October 1, according to estimates from Alinea Analytics. That sounds like a disaster for one of Xbox’s biggest series. It isn’t quite, because the same estimates say 1.7 million people played it through Game Pass, and 722,000 of them paid extra to start early.
Microsoft hasn’t confirmed any of these figures, and it doesn’t publish sales for its own games. So treat everything below as an outside estimate. It’s still the clearest look yet at what happens when a $70 flagship launches straight into a subscription.
The estimates, platform by platform
Alinea Analytics is a games market research firm that models sales and player counts from platform data. Its analyst Rhys Elliott posted the breakdown on X on October 9, and the full numbers look like this:
| Steam | Xbox (console and PC) | |
|---|---|---|
| Copies sold | 168,000 | 62,000 |
| Game Pass players | n/a | 1.7 million |
| Paid $30 early-access upgrades | n/a | 722,000 |
| Estimated revenue | about $11M | about $26M |
Steam sold almost three times as many copies as Xbox. Xbox still brought in about 70% of the roughly $37 million total, because of those upgrades.
What the $30 upgrade actually is
The Premium Edition upgrade let Game Pass subscribers pay $30 to play E-Day up to five days before the October 6 launch. You don’t own the game after buying it. You’re paying for early access to something your subscription already includes.
That’s why the number matters. Normally nobody can tell what a Game Pass player would have paid, because the game is simply there in the library. Here, 722,000 subscribers put down real money anyway. By Alinea’s count, about 250,000 of them bought the upgrade after reviews went live on October 1.
Our read: the paying audience is bigger than “230K” suggests
We analyzed Alinea’s 230K, 722K and $37M estimates ourselves, and the headline number undersells the launch. Add the 722,000 upgrades to the 230,000 copies and close to 950,000 people paid something for E-Day. Divide the $37 million by that group and the average comes to roughly $39 each.
We also compared it with full price. At Steam’s $69.99 price, $37 million is what about 530,000 copies would gross before store fees and regional pricing. So E-Day’s first week earned like a half-million seller, while selling fewer than a quarter-million copies.
The less flattering ratio is the one Elliott pointed out. On Xbox, upgrades outsold copies by nearly 12 to 1. That means the full-price version has almost no buyers on Microsoft’s own store, and more than four in ten Game Pass players who tried E-Day paid $30 instead of $70.
The game isn’t the problem
E-Day is reviewing very well. Polygon notes it sits at 88 on Metacritic and 87 on OpenCritic, which makes it the best-reviewed Gears in over a decade. Plenty of people are also playing it: per SteamDB, it peaked at 31,517 concurrent players on Steam on October 7.
Game Pass changes how people play, though. Alinea’s data shows 17% of Xbox players quit within an hour, against 6% on Steam. That’s the usual subscription effect: when a game costs nothing extra, more people try it and bounce. It happens with PS Plus games too.
Why Xbox will care
Day-one Game Pass is already shrinking at Xbox. Call of Duty left it. As our Modern Warfare 4 pre-order guide covers, MW4 won’t join the service until Holiday 2027. E-Day shows the other path: a paid early-access upgrade that recovers some money without pulling the game.
It’s also landing in a rough market. US console sales are already sliding as prices rise, which we covered in our look at record-high PS5 and Xbox prices. A flagship that earns half-million-seller money from under a quarter-million sales is fine. It just isn’t the breakout Xbox needs, and Elliott writes that some Microsoft executives already believe the service devalues games. E-Day gives them a strong example. (Rumors that day-one releases could leave Game Pass entirely have been dismissed by Microsoft so far.)
What this means for you
If you have Game Pass, nothing changes: E-Day is in the library, and the upgrade’s early-access window is over. If you’re on PC without a subscription, Steam is $69.99, and Steam players are sticking with it longer than Xbox players, by Alinea’s playtime data. Our E-Day beginner’s guide covers the modes and campaign length. If you’re on PS5, it isn’t coming to your console for now.
The next real data point is Microsoft’s own. Xbox tends to share player milestones when they’re good, so watch for an official E-Day player count in the coming weeks. If it stays quiet, these estimates will be the story that sticks. Our October release list has everything else launching this month.
Edited by Kerwin Stewart, Editor-in-Chief · How we report
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