Despite recent reports of a Gears of War: E-Day trailer with the PS5 logo appearing on Xbox’s official podcast (before being taken down), creative director Matt Searcy said that there was never any plan to release the title on Sony’s platform.
“Well, we never talked about it going to PS5,” he told Eurogamer. Regarding the purported change in plans, Fawcette went on to add that, “It was never changed.” Further in the conversation, Searcy spoke about how Gears of War: E-Day makes sense as an Xbox-exclusive release. “I would say that, Gears as an exclusive, makes a tonne of sense,” he said. “It’s kind of an honour, and exciting, to be one of the Xbox flagship titles.”
However, with console exclusivity also comes a much smaller audience, especially since Xbox consoles are fairly behind the PS5 in its install base. When asked about this, Searcy, along with art director Aryan Hanbeck, said that they weren’t too concerned about shipping the game to a smaller audience.
“Of course, it’s awesome to have [more] people play our games, but for Xbox and PC, you’ve got what is out there. We’re not too concerned about the size of the audience,” Hanbeck added. “We’ve shipped to audiences smaller before, and there are great shooters on Xbox already.”
Gears of War: E-Day is being developed for PC and Xbox Series X/S, and is slated for release on October 6th. The title got an extensive showcase last weekend via a dedicated Direct. Xbox also confirmed Clockwork Revolution, inXile’s next title, would not be coming to PS5 and further clarified the exclusivity isn’t time-limited for either.
“As part of our focus on the return of Xbox, we also announced that Gears of War: E-Day and Clockwork Revolution will be Xbox console exclusives,” said the company in a statement. “These are not timed exclusives. Games already announced for multiplatform releases will stick to that plan – we’re committed to investing in and growing Xbox both on console and beyond.”
Searcy, Hanbeck and technical director Kate Rayner had recently also spoken about how Gears of War: E-Day was The Coalition’s first entry in the franchise since 2015 that reused zero assets from previous games during development. To do this, the three spoke about how useful Unreal Engine 5 was throughout the process.
“We took advantage of UE5 to bring Gears up to speed with where modern gaming is, without losing what makes it authentic,” Searcy said. “You’re playing a sweaty Gears game — but it’s entirely built from scratch to capture the emotional core of those older games.”
Hanbeck also spoke about leaning on the horror-adjacent elements that the Gears franchise was known for in its earlier entries. “We wanted to lean into the horror-adjacent elements Gears always had. Light and dark, getting into scarier spaces, dynamic shadows. This tech lets us do that in a way we couldn’t before. You really don’t want to tell that story if you can’t deliver on the visual gravitas of what has to go with it. It deserves a certain amount of weight.”
