Gears of War: E-Day sold an estimated 230K copies in week one, with Game Pass eating into premium sales

Gears of War: E-Day is off to a commercially soft start, according to analyst Rhys Elliott of Alinea Analytics, who estimates the game moved just 230,000 copies in its first week across PC and Xbox. Steam accounted for 168,000 of those sales, while Xbox — covering both console and PC — contributed only 62,000.

The low copy-sale numbers don't tell the whole story, though. Elliott estimates 1.7 million players accessed E-Day through Game Pass, and 722,000 of them paid an extra $30 to upgrade to the Premium Edition for early access. Total revenue across the Xbox ecosystem reportedly hit around $27 million, with overall earnings reaching roughly $37 million. Elliott was blunt about what the numbers mean: "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." He added that Game Pass is "cannibalising much of the premium revenue," and called the situation a "hangover from a tried-and-exhausted strategy from a previous administration."

The tension between Game Pass and standalone sales isn't new — internal Microsoft documents surfaced during the 2023 Activision Blizzard merger proceedings showed the company was already aware that adding titles to Game Pass day one tends to suppress base game sales in the first year. Microsoft told IGN at the time that the model "offers gamers and game creators more choice and opportunity." E-Day is a particularly high-stakes case: it's a flagship exclusive meant to anchor Xbox's renewed push on first-party games, and it launched to strong critical reception, including a 9/10 from IGN's campaign review. The Coalition's studio head Mike Crump also called it a "natural choice" to be an Xbox exclusive earlier this week.

Microsoft hasn't confirmed any official sales figures, and it's still unclear how E-Day may have driven new or returning Game Pass subscriptions — a metric that could significantly change the revenue picture. Elliott himself called E-Day "a sublime game" that made his personal top 10, making the soft numbers more of a business model problem than a quality one. Whether Microsoft reconsiders its day-one Game Pass strategy for major releases remains the bigger question hanging over this launch.