Gears of War: E-Day's half-billion-dollar budget was no rumor

[zohaibahd]

The big picture: Most of the talk around BioWare's closure last month has focused on EA's new owners and the debt they loaded onto the publisher. But the studio's end may have just as much to do with how expensive big games have become. Xbox's latest Gears of War entry is a prime example, since it reportedly cost $500 million to make.

Bloomberg's Jason Schreier brought up the figure in a video explaining why EA chose to shut BioWare. Gears of War: E-Day cost Xbox $500 million, he said. "That is a real number, that is real," he added. In Schreier's view, that's simply what AAA games cost to make now, especially in North America.

About a week earlier, a source familiar with Xbox's business had already told Kotaku that E-Day cost over $500 million. That figure didn't even include marketing.

Windows Central's Jez Corden thinks the number actually covers everything The Coalition spent since its last game. After all, the studio also builds dev tools for Xbox and has chipped in on Forza and Fable. Even so, he believes most of that money did go into E-Day.

So much of that cost is The Coalition being on the hook for the Microsoft branch of Unreal and one of the flagship titles. I should know, I tried to get leadership to support a plan to have other studios adopt it and write off the support costs. Same problem with Turn10 and ForzaTech.

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– Derek Reese is making games (@derekree.se) 30 October 2026 at 21:04

Analytics firm Alinea estimated E-Day sold just 230,000 copies in its first week, despite a score of 87 on Metacritic. Sales did pick up after that. About three weeks after launch, a source told The Verge's Tom Warren that sales had passed 400,000 across Xbox and Steam.

Of course, neither count includes Game Pass, where Alinea estimates around 1.7 million people played the game instead. About 722,000 of them still paid $30 for early access. Those upgrades helped push E-Day's early revenue to roughly $37 million.

Even if Microsoft pocketed the full $70 from every copy, though, it would need to sell over 7 million just to cover development.

Budgets have grown far faster than sales, Schreier argued in the same video, so publishers are moving work outside North America and sticking to only their biggest franchises. At EA, that reportedly meant backing a new Star Wars Battlefront over Mass Effect.

Xbox, meanwhile, kept E-Day off PS5 and put it in Game Pass on day one. Kotaku figured that if a PS5 version sold as well as Gears of War: Reloaded, it would have added only about $33 million anyway, so subscriber numbers may end up mattering more to Xbox than copies sold.

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Gears of War: E-Day's half-billion-dollar budget was no rumor

 

[winjer]

This game is never going to recover it's development cost. I would not be surprised if The Coalition is hit with a lot of layoffs when Asha's second round is due.

 

[Dr Roboto]

I just want to point out that in 1993, Doom was built by a core development team of 5 to 6 people at id Software, which included creating the game engine. Either John Carmack should be ranked up there with Einstein, or modern game studios have really lost the thread. I guess both can be true. Yes, I do know that Doom is not really on the scale of modern AAA games, but in it day it was way ahead of the curve.

 

[James321]

Would love to see a breakdown of what exactly cost so much.

 

[ScottSoapbox]

The headline number including all of EA's Unreal support costs is misleading.

But the ever increasing bloat of AAA game development is a well documented problem.

And it's actually the normal nature of business: A new great product wins consumers and rewards the company with profits. Long term success then breeds admin bloat and complacency, resulting in larger, slower companies with worse products. Those companies are then replaced by younger, smaller ones with better products.

This natural cycle is disrupted by regulatory capture tilting the rules toward large incumbents. But video game is a tougher sell to convince politicians to protect.

 

[yRaz]

The headline number including all of EA's Unreal support costs is misleading.

But the ever increasing bloat of AAA game development is a well documented problem.

And it's actually the normal nature of business: A new great product wins consumers and rewards the company with profits. Long term success then breeds admin bloat and complacency, resulting in larger, slower companies with worse products. Those companies are then replaced by younger, smaller ones with better products.

This natural cycle is disrupted by regulatory capture tilting the rules toward large incumbents. But video game is a tougher sell to convince politicians to protect.

The problem with indie devs is they get bought up by AAA publishers and then higher new people to do the job they were doing. And they mostly don't care because they got rich when they sold the company and they're still collecting a paycheck while not doing anything.

 

[m4a4]

Considering they went back to the archaic practice of console exclusivity (aka, no sales on the PS5), I don't think they wanted or cared to make back their money.

But for the life of me, I don't know why they chose this flop of a game to do that with. They must've known that this studio was also rotten, and it would only hurt the brand with such a weak offering...

 

[ScottSoapbox]

The problem with indie devs is they get bought up by AAA publishers and then higher new people to do the job they were doing. And they mostly don't care because they got rich when they sold the company and they're still collecting a paycheck while not doing anything.

Yes but the big publishers can only do that if they are making money somewhere.

And while buying up small innovators does help big company products, it usually just slows the decline rather than fix things. (Meanwhile the admin bloat keeps increasing.)

 

[Theinsanegamer]

I just want to point out that in 1993, Doom was built by a core development team of 5 to 6 people at id Software, which included creating the game engine. Either John Carmack should be ranked up there with Einstein, or modern game studios have really lost the thread. I guess both can be true. Yes, I do know that Doom is not really on the scale of modern AAA games, but in it day it was way ahead of the curve.

Well modern engines are far more complex then the doom engine but the point still stands. Idtech maintains their own engine on a small team. It's not impossible.

These studios are so insanely bloated. How on earth did they blow half a billion on chest high wall simulator. Were the consultants for the gender pride flags really THAT expensive? Clearly it wasn't in the level design, or the writing, or any technical innovation.

 

[yRaz]

These studios are so insanely bloated. How on earth did they blow half a billion on chest high wall simulator. Were the consultants for the gender pride flags really THAT expensive? Clearly it wasn't in the level design, or the writing, or any technical innovation.

The same way Hollywood does. You have tons of executives and managers over inflating their worth, the contract things out to friends at skyhigh prices and then they post massive losses that get them a tax right off.

 

[Kirby1]

It's such a mismanagement of talent to have the coalition doing nothing but gears of war. Most technically impressive game that I have absolutely no interest in at all, and that's probably how most people feel.

Let the talent make something good, for once.

 

[AnilD]

Half a billion dollars for one game, excluding marketing, is an absolutely insane amount of risk. Even if the game is excellent, the math becomes almost impossible unless you have GTA-level sales. No wonder publishers are terrified of funding anything that isn't an established franchise.