Early Gears of War E-Day Sales Put Focus on XBOX Game Pass Trends

XBOX had a rough weekend, with early Gears of War: E-Day numbers that look weak at first glance, though most people aren’t asking the real question. Before that, Starfield is rumored to be heading to the Switch 2. The idea has been floating around for a long time, and it makes sense on paper. Bethesda has already brought Indiana Jones and Oblivion over to the Nintendo Switch 2, and both ports have held up well.

Given that track record, it's fair to assume Starfield is next on the to-do list. Plans may have changed, though. An industry insider says the Switch 2 version of Starfield ran into plenty of obstacles and development hurdles. They stopped short of confirming a cancellation, saying they don't know whether it's been shelved, but it wouldn't surprise them.

Nothing is official, yet the troubled development puts it well within the realm of possibility.

Even so, if Oblivion and Indiana Jones sell well on Nintendo's new console, a Switch 2 release still looks very doable. Microsoft already put in the effort to get the game running on the Xbox Series S, so the team could crack the code for this hardware down the road. How long that would take, and whether the publisher is willing to commit the resources, depends largely on how well its other games perform on the system.

And speaking of Nintendo, the physical-versus-digital conversation keeps rolling. Sony has done everything it can to convince players and investors that physical games are basically dead. Most people understand the data has been bent in digital's favor, especially when games that never received a physical release get lumped in with digital sales. That alone shows how skewed the results are.

Nintendo has been moving in the opposite direction lately. Pokémon Legends: Z-A makes that clear through its box art, and the company has now publicly committed to more physical games. In a recent statement, it said it has historically been agnostic and goes by what consumers prefer, weighing that very heavily. It also pointed out that its console is barely a year old and supports both digital and physical games.

There are no plans to ditch physical, because it knows how much fans like it, so staying agnostic remains the right approach. Hearing a company say it makes these choices because some customers prefer them stands in stark contrast to what Sony has been doing. Ultimately, fans shouldn't make this decision for them. They should get to choose. Digital may eventually reach the 90% ratio Sony likes to suggest, but today it hasn't.

Even its own first-party games tell a different story.

Plenty of Sony's big blockbusters sit close to the 50% physical mark, and in some cases beyond it. Astro Bot, God of War, and Marvel's Wolverine have all performed well on physical, which tells you everything you need to know. When players can pick between a physical copy and a digital one, the balance is far more even than the company wants you to believe.

Meanwhile, the Japanese publisher knows how much physical matters to its audience, so it keeps pushing it. Not everyone loves game key cards because the full data isn't on the cartridge, but they're still a physical product you can buy at a retail store and resell on the secondary market if you want. Some companies do use key cards to skew their own figures toward digital, even counting them in digital sales, which is badly misleading.

Either way, this publisher has done good work giving fans a choice, and that choice will likely stick around for the foreseeable future. That's exactly what players want to hear, and its biggest rival could learn from that. That brings you to the XBOX situation. Over the weekend, a third-party analytics firm released an early estimate for Gears of War: E-Day, and the word "estimate" matters here.

This is not an official number from Microsoft. Not everyone trusts the firm, but for the most part it has done fairly well in the past, which is why it's worth discussing. According to that estimate, Gears of War: E-Day sold roughly 230,000 units across XBOX and PC, with just 62,000 coming from XBOX consoles.

This is because XBOX Game Pass is the leading platform by a wide margin. The firm estimates that 722,000 of its early players came through XBOX Game Pass, which raises the question of whether that's a good thing or a bad one. It's more complicated than some people let on. It starts with the budget.

Gears of War: E-Day took nearly seven years to develop, and long development cycles are rarely a good sign.

Most franchises, meaning pretty much everything besides Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto, can't get away with that kind of timeline because it sends the budget through the roof. Even though the series ranks as one of the all-time greats, a $300 to $400 million budget is far too much, with or without XBOX Game Pass.

That's why the subscription isn't the number-one issue. The problem falls directly on The Coalition's management and the previous XBOX leadership. A game like Gears of War: E-Day shouldn't have taken seven years, and because it did, PlayStation never would have saved it either. You can set that idea aside.

The numbers do reveal something about XBOX players: they're opting into the subscription rather than buying a game at full price. Multiplayer could be part of the reason. The series has a big multiplayer fan base, and those players need the subscription anyway, so it makes sense to play the campaign through it instead of paying extra. That could explain why the subscription figures for Gears of War: E-Day are so large.

The conversation shouldn't be about whether the service cannibalized Gears of War: E-Day, because it did what it was designed to do, at least under the previous leadership. The more useful angle is whether any of this fits Asha Sharma's vision for XBOX and its subscription. She has already changed the service, and signs suggest she'll keep changing it in 2027. Phil Spencer bet everything on day-one releases, including first-party titles.

It's unclear whether Asha Sharma believes in day-one games the same way he did, and she doesn't seem to.

It's still early days for Asha Sharma, and she seems to be digging into the data, with Gears of War: E-Day likely to be a central piece of it. If these numbers concern her, especially as the company pivots toward exclusives, she could further change the subscription. For example, she could decide to stagger big first-party games into the service instead of having them arrive on day one.

Instead of launching exclusives at release, they might show up six months later, or even longer. It's hard to say what she'll choose, but she has already confirmed more changes are coming, so the only real question is what she wants to change. Updated numbers also arrived today showing that Gears of War: E-Day had the second-best debut for XBOX this year, behind only Forza Horizon 6.

That means it beat out Halo and Minecraft Dungeons 2, which is a positive sign. XBOX may share a bigger update in the coming days, but for now, these are still early estimates and should be treated that way. Whatever comes next, Gears of War: E-Day may shape how XBOX handles its biggest releases.