Some people claim to have noticed the Gears 5 player base dwindling since its initial September launch, be that due to regularly encountering the same individuals online, or it taking longer and longer for matchmaking to find suitable multiplayer lobbies. These suspicions have prompted questions over the Gears 5 player count, which developer The Coalition hasn’t officially shared figures for, but there is evidence to suggest that fans’ concerns are well-founded, at least when it comes to the Steam PC version. Here’s what we could extrapolate about the current Gears 5 player figures.
Is Gears 5 losing players?
With user base decline being a concern to those remaining in the Gears 5 ecosystem, we took a moment to investigate. When it comes to the fifth mainline Gears of War title’s performance on leading PC storefront Steam, things were pretty underwhelming from the start. According to SteamDB, Gears 5 peaked at a little over 10,000 concurrent players at launch and has steadily declined since, to the point that it rarely reaches 1,000 concurrents just two months later.
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Of course, it’s important to consider a couple of major factors here: Gears is traditionally an Xbox franchise that many Steam users will have no attachment to. Additionally, the Gears 5 Ultimate Edition was available via the Xbox PC application at no additional cost to Game Pass Ultimate subscribers. With the latter being a far greater value proposition, it’s possible that even Steam devotees were swayed into opting out of Valve’s marketplace on this occasion.
The game’s Xbox launch, on the other hand, was an unmitigated success. It set a new first-part sales record for Xbox One, in addition to being a “massive” success story for Xbox Game Pass. Gears 5 even surpassed Fortnite to become the Xbox platform’s most popular game for a while, but that’s no longer the case. At the time of writing it currently sits at 29th on the Xbox One’s “most played games” chart, lagging behind older games including Star Wars Battlefront II, Fallout 4, and Call of Duty: WWII.
As you can see, there has been a clear and significant drop in the Gears 5 player count across both PC and Xbox since launch.
