The first week of Gears of War: E-Day, Xbox's big release of 2026, ended with two hot topics. On Monday, October 12, The Coalition confirmed that dropped connections, sign-in failures, and lag spikes in multiplayer were caused by DDoS attacks on the game's servers. At the same time, analytics firm Alinea estimated about 230,000 copies sold, a figure that sparked a debate about Game Pass's effect on sales of Microsoft's games.

The server attack

Players reported random disconnections, trouble getting into matches, stuttering, and the dreaded "rubber-banding," when a character snaps back on screen. In a statement on X, the official Gears of War community account attributed the problems to distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks targeting the game's online services. Scott Van Vliet, an executive connected to The Coalition, said the team was working tirelessly to fix the problems and thanked the community for its patience.

As of this writing, the studio had not said whether the attack has been fully contained. DDoS attacks overload servers with fake traffic and do not, in principle, involve the theft of player data.

How much the game has sold (according to estimates)

Gears of War: E-Day launched on October 6 for Xbox Series X|S and PC (Xbox app and Steam) and joined Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass on day one. According to Alinea Analytics, cited by Pure Xbox and Push Square, the game sold about 230,000 copies, 168,000 of them on Steam, with estimated revenue of $37 million. The firm also estimates that 1.7 million Game Pass subscribers played E-Day and that 722,000 of them paid for the Premium upgrade, which would bring the total to almost 950,000 people who spent some money on the game.

On Steam, peak concurrent players after the full launch was around 31,000, according to SteamDB. That figure does not include people playing on Xbox or through Game Pass on PC.

The Game Pass debate

Alinea says the game is excellent, but its revenue was held back because Xbox's own storefront gave its most willing buyers a reason not to pay. That reading was challenged by Circana analyst Mat Piscatella, who pointed out that Game Pass is not free: in his view, calling the game "free on Game Pass" is the wrong framing, since the subscription has a monthly cost and the release likely drew in new subscribers.

Microsoft has not released official sales or player numbers. Keep in mind that estimates from firms like Alinea are calculated from samples and can differ significantly from real data.

What we still don't know

  • Who is behind the DDoS attacks and whether they could happen again.
  • How many players E-Day has had in total across Xbox, PC, and Game Pass.

To compare with another big recent release, see Marvel's Wolverine's estimated sales.