XBOX |OT|

[JRPGfan]

shikamaru317 said:

Without knowing the exact costs associated with Gamepass or Gears E-Day development, it is impossible for any of us, industry analyst or layman, to ever know if it's doing well enough to be considered a success. We would need:

1. The exact budget figure for the Gears E-Day itself, development and marketing, and not including costs associated with The Coalition making toolsets multiple 1st and 2nd party games will benefit from (because those costs would be spread out over the budgets for multiple upcoming games that use the toolsets), or the costs of assisting other Xbox studios with development the last 7 years since Gears 5 released
2. An exact number of current Gamepass subscribers and a breakdown of how many subs are on each price tier, PC, Essential, Premium, and Ultimate, in order to work out the monthly revenue of Gamepass, and especially the revenue from the PC and Ultimate tiers, which are the only tiers with day one 1st and 2nd party releases now
3. An exact figure for the upkeep of running Gamepass, server electricity costs and such, pay for employees in the Gamepass division, in order to subtract costs from the yearly revenue figure
4. A figure for how much money Xbox spends on 3rd party Gamepass deals each year, to subtract those costs from the Gamepass revenue figure.
5. An internal Xbox estimate of how many more copies of Gears E-Day Xbox believes they would have sold if there was no day one Gamepass Ultimate or PC Gamepass release
6. How many new subscribers Gears E-Day drew to PC Gamepass and Gamepass Ultimate, and how many months they stay subbed into the future

It's nowhere near as cut and dry to determine a games success on a subscription model than it is on a purely sales model, because there are so many factors.

Tom Henderson says he has heard insiders claim "upwards of 400m dollars" for it's development.
Does it really matter if it is 300m or 380m?

While we don't have a break down, of the gamepass user base that played it... or how much they are subscribed for... we do roughly know it is ~1.7m users out of a pool of say 20m ish total gamepass users.  We know that around ~17% of those (1.7m) played less than 1 hour, and roughly ~54% played less than 5 hours total (of gears E-day).  Alot of gamepass users install something, play it abit, and uninstall aftewards.  Xbox avg playtime is alot lower than Steam users that bought the game.

I think I remember reading that how gamepass deals with the money it hands out, is based on users and playtime, for each title.
So a game that has a wildly large pool of gamepass players, playing it for along time, will get the biggest cut of the pie.

So yes, we won't ever have 100% down to the last cent, accuracy....

If sales/dlc(early access) make up ~$37m revenue (before some steam cuts, and taxes ect).... we do know that is a far ways off from "upwards of 400m dollars".

We also know, that most games, from sales, make like ~30-70% of their total revenue from like the first week of sales.

So lets say down the line, gears E-Day makes ~100m total from sales.

The question becomes will Gamepass cover the remaining 200-300m in costs?

I think this game ends up losing money.
Which again, is not that rare. Look at playstation (and all its live service attempts).... I don't even think Wolverine will make back it's costs either.

Last edited by JRPGfan - on 11 October 2026