Somehow, the new Gears Of War game faces an even bigger battle than expected to make a profit, as it’s rumoured to have cost a hefty $500 million to make.
Video game budgets are typically a closely guarded secret, but it’s well known that high-end AAA fare has grown much more expensive to make in recent years.
Yet we’re still flummoxed to hear new rumours about the budget of Xbox exclusive Gears Of War: E-Day, which is alleged to have cost more than $500 million (about £374 million), and that’s not including marketing.
If this is accurate, that would make Gears Of War: E-Day one of the most expensive video games ever made and certainly more costly than any modern PlayStation exclusive.
This figure comes courtesy of Kotaku, which quotes an anonymous source familiar with Xbox’s business.
While Sony has never formally shared budgets for its games, it did accidentally reveal in 2023 that The Last Of Us Part 2 and Horizon Forbidden West, both late-gen PlayStation 4 games, cost $220 million (£174 million) and $212 million (£168 million) to make, respectively.
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Then, the Insomniac hack from that same year revealed that PlayStation 5 exclusive Spider-Man 2 cost an incredible $300 million (£237 million), making it the most expensive PlayStation game so far.
At least that had the excuse of starring Spider-Man, the licence for which would be very expensive in its own right. Gears Of War: E-Day is a franchise Xbox already owns and given its dwindling popularity in recent years, spending that much money on it seems like madness.
A budget of $500 million would mean that it was only half as expensive as the lowest estimate for GTA 6. There is no agreement on GTA 6’s budget but estimates have ranged from around $1 billion (about £748 million) to $3 billion or more.
Gears Of War: E-Day needs to sell a lot of copies in order to make a profit, but Microsoft really hampered its chances by locking it to Xbox consoles (which continue to not sell) and PC, with a PlayStation 5 version believed to have been cancelled as part of the company’s pivot back to exclusives.
Granted, a PlayStation 5 release may not have helped much, since it was reported that last year’s Gears Of War 1 remaster wasn’t that big of a hit on Sony’s console, but that only speaks to how Gears Of War’s popularity is not what it was and does not justify such a large budget.
It’s especially galling when Microsoft could have used some of that money to retain some of its employees instead of culling thousands of them and getting rid of multiple studios.
Said layoffs are still ongoing, with more are expected to lose their jobs in the coming months, and it wouldn’t be shocking if that includes members of Gears Of War studio The Coalition.
Studio head Mike Crump has said that Gears Of War: E-Day’s success isn’t entirely reliant on traditional game sales, saying the goal is to also drive up Game Pass subscriptions and ‘be the best-looking game on the Xbox and really show the industry what’s possible with our hardware.’
The Coalition is also supposedly a favourite amongst Xbox execs, which would explain why it’s largely avoided the many job cuts to plague Microsoft over the last few years.
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