The launch of Gears of War: Reloaded on PC was a blow to The Coalition and Xbox Game Studios. From day one, players faced serious problems: errors prevented the game from launching, promised pre-order bonuses were missing, and there was no split-screen co-op mode that was advertised on the official page.
The result is "mixed" reviews for the project on Steam.
The numbers look even worse. According to SteamDB, the peak online presence on release day was only 4,819 players — the lowest result for the entire franchise on the platform. For comparison: Gears 5 in 2019 launched with more than 10,000 users, and Gears Tactics in 2020 with seven thousand. In the case of Reloaded, the situation quickly deteriorated — just a few hours after launch, the number of active players fell below a thousand, making it almost impossible to find matches.
There are several reasons for the low interest. The game is available on Xbox Game Pass, which reduces sales on Steam, but the same was true for previous installments. The release on PlayStation 5 took part of the audience to the console, and the constant re-release of content affected interest — Reloaded has become the third version of the same games, after the original and the Ultimate Edition in 2015.
