Gears of War: E-Day, the origin story of the long-running Gears of War franchise, launched on Steam, Xbox, and Game Pass, and while Microsoft has been building hype for the new Gears game for several months leading up to launch day, the game’s launch performance on Steam isn’t all that stellar. According to SteamDB, E-Day peaked with a somewhat disappointing 31,517 concurrent players on Steam, although there’s a good chance that much of its player base is playing through Game Pass or on Xbox Series consoles. To be fair, the game launched mid-week, so we may see an upward trend in player numbers over the launch weekend. Reviews for Gears of War: E-Day have also been lukewarm, with Steam’s review rating reporting that only 74% of reviews on the platform are positive. On its own, that score isn’t terrible, but the negative reviews seem to be due to stability, gameplay, and plot issues. Some of the reviews complained about frequent PC crashes, while many long-time fans seem to have had issues with what they call misleading marketing that advertised the return of old characters from the series, only for those characters to be replaced from the beginning. There are also complaints about the lack of features in the multiplayer game, such as custom lobbies and meat shields.
