With Gears of War: E-Day now out in the wild (PC, Xbox Series), you'd think The Coalition would be taking a moment to savour the launch, but that doesn't appear to be the case. Only last week, our colleagues at Eurogamer reported that the developers feared they would be next in line for the wave of layoffs that has hit several Microsoft studios in recent months.
It doesn't help that Juan Vaca (narrative director on Gears of War: E-Day) left the company a few days after the game went gold, which understandably rattled the teams. That said, one of Eurogamer's sources felt The Coalition was in the American giant's good books, especially after years of fruitful collaboration.
The Coalition hit by layoffs?
In a recent interview with the BBC, Mike Crump suggested the situation was out of his hands. "What I tell myself, and what I tell the team too, is that we have to focus on what we can control," The Coalition's studio head explained. "For us, that means putting out a really good game that people are going to love. I think we managed that together."
While praising his colleagues' craft and experience, Mike Crump was keen to point out that Gears of War: E-Day was built from a blank page, and that it should therefore serve as a solid foundation for the instalments to come. He reckons development on the next entry shouldn't take anywhere near as long, in fact. The question now is whether, in the meantime, The Coalition will have been forced to part with some of its talent, Microsoft having announced 4,800 layoffs (3,200 of them within the Xbox division) by mid-2027.
Even if you already know, a quick reminder that our Gears of War: E-Day review is live. In his piece, Maxime writes: "Gears of War E-Day is exactly the back-to-basics the series needed. After a Gears 5 that rather lost itself in its big semi-open areas, The Coalition returns to what has always been the series' strength: a tightly handled campaign, a generous one too, visceral combat, a cover system that's as satisfying as ever and a sense of spectacle that has lost none of its swagger." No less.
