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