Gears of War: E-Day reportedly cost more than $500 million, excluding marketing. That’s a hell of a sum, but according to a new report that’s exactly what was spent on bringing Marcus and Dom back.
The figure comes from Kotaku’s Ethan Gach, citing just one unnamed source familiar with Xbox’s business. Microsoft didn’t respond to the outlet’s request for comment, and the report provides no breakdown of the costs, which makes things a bit trickier.
This follows Tom Henderson’s claim back in June that he had heard E-Day’s budget was upwards of $400 million. Speaking on the Insider Gaming podcast, Henderson described the figure as “insane.” At the time, it wasn’t clear whether that amount included marketing or other expenses.
However, Windows Central’s Jez Corden disputed Henderson’s claims. Corden said on the Xbox Two podcast that E-Day “didn’t cost $400 million,” pointing to The Coalition’s work beyond its own games. Corden said that the studio is the “technological glue for all of Xbox,” arguing that its work on development tools, Unreal Engine and support for other projects meant some of that expenditure was spread across Xbox’s wider portfolio. In his view, treating it all as the budget for E-Day was misleading.
Of course, tools and overheads are legitimate development expenses. Something built or bought for one game can also end up being used on the next, and that doesn’t automatically mean it should be removed from the first game’s budget. Trying to untangle every reusable piece of technology would send us down a very long, very boring emergence hole.
The more relevant distinction is between money spent making E-Day and money spent helping other Xbox teams with their own projects. If Corden’s explanation is accurate, we can’t simply assume every dollar spent at The Coalition belongs to Gears or that it wasn’t viewed as a worthwhile expendature because the tech would be used in multiple other games across Xbox. For example, Xbox may have signed off on creating a horrendously expensive new tool for E-Day because they also knew that same tool could help out multiple projects in the future. Technically, that tool would still fall under E-Day’s budget, but it’s not quite so cut and dry as that.
The sales picture adds another complication. Alinea Analytics’ Rhys Elliott estimated on October 9 that E-Day had sold 230,000 copies since its October 1 advance-access launch, with 168,000 on Steam and 62,000 across Xbox console and PC.
Alinea also estimated that 1.7 million people had accessed the game through Game Pass, including 722,000 who paid for the $30 Premium Edition upgrade. Including those upgrades, estimated revenue reached roughly $37 million, meaning the number of people who paid something for E-Day was considerably larger than the full-game sales figure suggests.
But that’s still a long ways off of recouping the massive developement budget Gach is claiming his sources told him about. Indeed, Gach said his source noted that E-Day would be unlikely to ever recoup its costs regardless of what platforms it shipped on, but as an exclusive would be expected to contributue to rebuilding user activity on Game Pass.
So while it’s hard to get a completely accurate number, it does look like we can safely say E-Day had a monstrous budget, one that puts it at the very top of the triple-A space. What we don’t know is whether Xbox will deem it to be money well spent.
