Rumor: Gears of War: E-Day Cost XBOX $500 Million

And that number doesn't include marketing spend!

Gears of War: E-Day has been a catastrophe for XBOX. Launching worldwide on October 6, 2026, it has been 16 days since the game became available for purchase on both XBOX and Steam, and in that time the sales numbers have been abysmal. Although we can't provide exact sales data for XBOX as the company doesn't share it, analytics firm Alinea puts the numbers around 62,000 copies sold. Steam has allegedly seen the bulk of sales at 168,000 units. Game Pass users have of course given the game a play since it comes at no additional cost to Ultimate tier subscribers, and that number is 1.7 million players. No matter how you slice it, E-Day hasn't even been a blip on the radar among gamers.

It's pretty astounding to think that a Gears of War game should so wildly underperform, but sales haven't been especially high for the series over the past couple of installments, with Gears of War: Ultimate Edition (which was multiplatform and also launched on PlayStation 5) estimated to have only moved around one million units. Despite this, XBOX was apparently feeling pretty gung ho about the prospects of E-Day, as the company allegedly didn't spend the speculated $400 million on production of the game, but rather a much more voluminous $500 million, according to new rumors.

That's half a billion dollars for those keeping track at home, and no, somehow that doesn't include the marketing budget. If the sales estimates for E-Day are even remotely close to accurate, XBOX is going to be losing hundreds of millions of dollars on this game. This rumor comes from Kotaku which says that a "source familiar with Xbox’s business" is making this latest assertion about the budget, so make of that what you will. E-Day developer The Coalition has been bracing for layoffs since around the launch of the game; with such a poor return on investment, XBOX might have no choice but to make cuts.

Source: Kotaku