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Gears of War: E-Day launched this week, and while it is excellent, the game was pulled away from a PS5 launch earlier this year. In a recent interview, The Coalition Studio Head Mike Crump claims that this was all part of the plan.
In an interview with the BBC, Crump defended the choice to be an Xbox exclusive, despite a likely ludicrous budget saying, “Gears has been an exclusive franchise to Xbox for 20 years now. It’s sort of entwined deeply with the brand.”
However, Gears of War: Reloaded did launch on PS5 last year, so the franchise as a whole isn’t exactly Xbox-exclusive anymore. It’s also likely that if E-Day did launch on PlayStation, it’d see higher sales numbers.
Crump claims that the metrics for success go further than that, though. He told the BBC that the series is meant to, at least in part, carry the banner for the Xbox platform and give people a “reason to be in the Xbox ecosystem.” Queue Xbox CEO Asha Sharma’s decision to pull the game from the PS5 release slate.
Regardless, the game will now likely have lower sales than it otherwise would have. When the BBC asked Crump about that, he insisted that the studio is taking a broader view than just looking at sales figures and retention numbers.
“We measure things like, are we showcasing the platform? Are we pushing the hardware to it limits? Are we showcasing what the Xbox is capable of? …Our goal basically is to be the best-looking game on the Xbox and really show the industry what’s possible with our hardware,” he answered.
If the goal is to be a tech demo about what the Xbox consoles are capable of, I’d argue that it’s a straight-up success. The game looks incredible on both the Xbox Series X and Series S, so much so that The Coalition had to rely on trickery with the Page File to get the game running smoothly on the less-powerful console. The game is also incredible, and our reviewer Ryan McCaffrey gave it a 9, saying:
“By going back to the beginning, Gears of War: E-Day returns to the heart of this series: Marcus Fenix, Dom Santiago, and a Locust horde that’s as terrifying as it is dangerous. E-Day pulls off the tightrope act of giving us a heartfelt prequel with strong characters even when we know how it ends. On a more mechanical level, it also evolves the enemies, weapons, and combat you’d expect to deliver a Gears of War campaign that stands toe-to-toe with any of the others. It wraps up with 10 years still left to go before Marcus gets tossed in prison ahead of the events of the first Gears of War, so here’s hoping the next one stays in the past for a while longer – and that we don’t have to wait another seven years for it to arrive.”
But even if the game is a critical hit and a technical marvel, sales numbers will inevitably play a role in the game’s success, especially as Microsoft is currently in the middle of a months-long restructuring campaign. Right after launch, developers at The Coalition told Eurogamer they were expecting layoffs. However, Crump has since addressed those concerns, saying, “For us that’s about shipping a great game that people are going to love and I feel like, as a team, we’ve done that.”
Let’s just hope that a pretty game and high review scores really are enough to keep the Xbox layoff machine at bay.
Jackie Thomas is the Senior Tech Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. She’s been covering gaming hardware for more than a decade for IGN, TechRadar, Gizmodo, PC Gamer and more. You can follow her @Jackiecobra
