The ongoing multiplayer beta for Gears of War: E-Day seems to be doing quite well. Since being opened to the wider public on August 10th, the title has been hitting new highs when it comes to concurrent players on Steam. According to SteamDB, the title has hit its all-time peak of 22,084 concurrent players.
This is an especially notable figure when taking the general player numbers for the Gears of War franchise into account. When Gears of War: Reloaded came out last year, it managed to hit a concurrent player peak of 4,819. Gears 5, on the other hand, was able to cross 10,000 players. Turn-based strategy game Gears Tactics came in at 7,351 concurrent players.
Gears of War: E-Day seems to be on the path to overtaking all of its predecessors when it comes to player numbers. While the game isn’t out yet – it’s coming to PC and Xbox Series X/S on October 6th – the strong player numbers seen by just the beta would indicate that there is a strong appetite for the cover shooter, at least for its competitive multiplayer aspects.
Offering further context is Rhys Elliot of Alinea Analytics, who has estimated that the first day of the Gears of War: E-Day beta saw 1.2 million Xbox players across console and Windows trying out the game. He went on to note that nearly 90 percent of beta players had previously played Gears 5, and 55 percent had played Gears of War: Reloaded. However, it is worth keeping in mind that the majority of these players experienced the titles through Game Pass.
When it comes to Steam, Elliot has estimated that pre-order figures for Gears of War: E-Day have doubled thanks to the popularity of the beta, going up from around 50,000 pre-orders to now sitting at around 100,000.
Players spending time with the beta seem to be fairly engaged with it as well, with 24.1 percent of players having spent over 10 hours, 12.7 percent having played for over 15 hours, and 6.5 percent playing for more than 20 hours. This averaged out to 6.5 percent of players enjoying the beta for four to five hours on a daily basis.
Leading up to the beta kicking off, developer The Coalition had acknowledged that there are some known issues with the game’s build. Along with this, the studio warned players that performance and stability were still a work-in-progress, and that players were likely going to face crashes and frame rate drops.
Gears of War: E-Day is going to be a prequel that takes place fourteen years before the events of the original Gears of War. With Emergence Day happening, players step into the shoes of Marcus Fenix and Dominic Santiago as they try their best to survive the Locust invasion, and along the way desperately save as many survivors as they can. The title will include a reimagined version of the franchise’s iconic Horde Siege mode, as well as PvP multiplayer.
In the meantime, take a look at the Limited Edition Gears of War: E-Day Xbox Series X/S controller.
