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The reported budget is around $400 million.
"Hello everyone and welcome back to another GRTV News, today we're going to be touching on a report that started circulating actually at the end of last week, it's specifically in regards to Gears of War E-Day, it's a report that's come out talking about the game's budget and basically Gears of War E-Day is supposedly one of the most expensive games ever made or in the process of being made, the current rumour is that it's going to cost the Coalition and Xbox over $400 million to make and that's just a production because we haven't really seen it being marketed yet, which naturally puts a huge amount of pressure on the game to be a commercial hit because it needs to make the money back, which now makes it a little bit more challenging to do so because of course it is a PC and an Xbox console exclusive title, but anyway let's take a look and we'll talk after."
"So yeah, rumour Gears of War E-Day looks set to be one of the most expensive games of all time according to a very trustworthy source, the game has a budget upwards of $400 million, so by now most people have probably noticed that the upcoming Gears of War E-Day looks spectacular, the Canadian studio, the Coalition, is alongside the British developer Playground Games, Forza Horizon 6, arguably the absolute best at producing spectacular graphics within the Xbox game studio, so good in fact that Epic Games enlisted their help to deliver the nearly photorealistic Unreal Engine 5 tech demo, The Matrix Awakens, their latest fully developed game is 2019's Gears 5, so the Coalition has really had plenty of time to work on Gears of War E-Day, October 6th is finally the launch day and then we'll take on the role of a young Marcus Fenix and his friends as all hell breaks loose on the planet Serra, read our massive preview here, but quality comes at a price, journalist Tom Henderson is known for his good sources and in the latest episode of the Insider Gaming podcast, Henderson says that the Gears of War budget is insane, I've heard upwards of $400 million, if this is true it means that Gears of War E-Day is likely one of the 5 most expensive games ever to develop and keep in mind that marketing for it has barely even started yet, whether it will be able to recoup the cost remains to be seen, Microsoft announced during their Xbox Game Showcase last week that it will be released exclusively for PC and Xbox Series S and X and clarified that it will not be a timed exclusive, if it turns out to be good enough however it should still lead to strong sales regardless as well as a boost in Game Pass subscriptions."
"Now to me, we often talk about how AAA games are too expensive and they cost too much money to make and they take too long to make, it's just not a good financial investment when you're looking at a title that needs to sell 10 million copies or something major to break even, I worry about this a little bit because Gears of War is a popular franchise but it's not, I wouldn't necessarily put Gears of War in that upper echelon of, or at least today anyway, it's sort of, you know, Gears of War is a very different beast today than it was a decade ago, 15 years ago, and I wouldn't put it up in that same bracket as the other sort of tentpole names that Xbox Game Studios has, so putting this much money into a Gears of War project to me is a little bit dangerous, especially one where you're really desperately limiting the places people can play it by not selling it on PlayStation 5."
"I do worry that it's going to struggle to make back its money and the problem when you make a financial decision like this is if it doesn't make back its money then there's repercussions and you don't want to see the coalition affected but that's just how business operates, especially in this industry, so it's a little bit concerning."
"I do think as well though that this highlights an issue that Microsoft has been facing with its Xbox Game Studios initiative for a long while and that it takes too long to make games and they cost too much money.
There was a rumour going around that before they decided to cancel Perfect Dark and basically shutter the initiative, they'd spent around like 800 million on that project, on all the different ways they were trying to develop it."
"Again, it's too much money, it's too much money, it's a huge amount of, it's a huge waste of commercial resources, and I do worry a little bit if this report from Henderson is true that the same will somewhat apply to Gears of War E-Day and the coalition.
I think personally that a Gears of War game needs to be made for 200 million or less and even then that's still a lot of money, that's a huge amount of money that we're talking about here because while they will support the multiplayer and there will be things added to the multiplayer, I don't think Gears of War is quite viewed as a multiplayer first franchise in the same way as say for example Halo, where Halo always has great campaigns but Halo has always had really good multiplayer over the years as well, it's one of the sort of, you'd have to say one of the two core pillars of it, Gears of War is sort of cinematic single player storytelling, then you have the other pillars of the horde modes and then you also have the multiplayer for the people who are looking for that as well."
"So I do worry about this a little bit because let's say they sell it as a full price game, it probably will be a full price game, the prices are probably already out if you look for pre-order stuff somewhere, I wouldn't know them off the top of my head, but let's say it's £70, they probably will need to sell 3, well probably 5 plus million at the very least and again that's, we're talking sold copies there, it's difficult with Xbox knowing how they incorporate Game Pass subscriptions into that, whether or not getting let's say 2 million people to return to Game Pass is classified as success for Xbox Game Studios and their investment into the coalition in Gears of War E-Day, it's difficult to panel this out, you need a much more qualified financial expert than me to be able to talk about this stuff, but I do look at that big $400 million number and I think, I'm not sure about this one, I'm not sure about it at all, so we'll stay tuned, regardless I'm looking forward to the game, I think it looks excellent from a game perspective, but from a business perspective I'm not sure it's the savviest of choices, but again we'll stay tuned and as we know more will keep you posted, but otherwise that's all the time that I have, I'll be back tomorrow for the next GeoTV News of the Week, so until then I hope you enjoy the rest of your Monday and I'll see you all on the next one."
