The overall budget of Xbox Game Studios and The Coalition’s upcoming third-person shooter, Gears of War: E-Day, is more than twice of IO Interactive’s 007 First Light.
During the latest episode of the Insider Gaming podcast, known insider and co-host Tom Henderson mentioned hearing from his sources that Gears of War: E-Day has a massive budget, amounting to more than 400 million US Dollars. “Gears of War budget is insane,” he said. “I’ve heard upwards of 400 Million dollars.” As of writing, the game has been in development for over 6 years.
For the sake of comparison, according to a recent report, 007 First Light has a budget of around 202.8 million US Dollars, which is less than half of the budget of Gears of War: E-Day despite being developed in a similar time frame. A key difference here is the location of the development studios for both games. While James Bond’s latest outing was developed in Europe, the Gears of War prequel is being developed in North America.
Bloomberg’s investigative journalist Jason Schreier recently shared that the numbers he’s heard floating around for AAA game development budgets in North America these days are 300 million US Dollars or more. According to him, exact budgets of video game productions can be tough to corroborate due to limited transparency from publishers, but this nine-digit figure helps in explaining the current state of the industry. He added that if a AAA title cost less to make, it was probably made outside of North America. He further mentioned that these expenses are almost entirely comprised of developer salaries and overhead costs required to employ them, and that they have nothing to do with executive compensation, which is mostly in the form of stock.
Gears of War: E-Day is set for release on October 6, 2026, for Xbox Series X|S and Windows PC.
