Gears of War: E-Day has sold more than 400,000 paid copies across Xbox and Steam, a figure The Verge’s Tom Warren published on October 29 from a single unnamed source. The number leaves out Game Pass. The game’s budget has been reported at more than $500 million before marketing, so that number of sales, while sounding impressive, doesn’t come close to paying for the cost of the game and would be a huge loss leader if that budget is accurate. Four weeks into its run, the loudest argument around Microsoft’s flagship shooter has little to do with cover mechanics or campaign pacing. It concerns 20 pride emblems in the multiplayer customization menu, which dominated the talk of the game since it was announced to be coming out.
The trouble started on the first morning of early access. Premium Edition owners got in five days ahead of the October 6 launch, and players did what players always do with a new multiplayer game: they went through every menu and posted what they found. One tab was labeled Pride. It held 20 profile emblems, each with small and large versions plus a banner. The emblems appear behind a player’s gamertag in lobbies, on scoreboards, and in match intros and outros. A player who never equips one still sees the choices of everyone else in the lobby.
A screenshot of that tab started the fire. @CultClassicCage posted it on X that morning with a caption that has since passed 680,000 views:
“Crazy how you can even come up with 20 different pride flags for a video game. Modern video games are a joke lol #GearsofWarEday”
By afternoon the aggregator @Pirat_Nation had carried it to a much bigger crowd. His post drew 1.53 million views and 1,791 replies, and it named six of the emblems, Abrosexual and Demisexual among them. The unfamiliar labels did much of the work. @DANNYonPC, a Battlefield community figure, posted to 77,500 views: “Gears of war E-Day has tons of different pride banners, including niche ones i haven’t even heard of before #GiftedbyXbox”. In a reply thread, @FellowNick wrote: “wtf is Demisexual they are just making stuff up now”. @TheBugleDaily1 proposed a remedy: “Since Gears of War E-Day has pride emblems, how about they add some based emblems.”
Some players read the menu as a statement of priorities. @ThePaladinForge put it this way: “Gears of War: E-Day gives you 20 pride emblems. Abrosexual, agender, bigender, demisexual, the whole list. The COG is fighting for a country, and there is no flag for it. No cross. No symbol for straight players, who are almost everyone in the lobby.”
Defenders had a short answer. @viktorvaughn__ wrote: “Oh no! Emblems you can ignore, the horror!!!” The emblems do carry no gameplay effect, and nobody has to equip one. They also show up on everyone else’s screen, which is the point critics keep returning to.
The franchise has done this before. Gears 5 shipped in September 2019 with 19 pride banners, and E-Day has 20. @ShaunDucky pointed to that precedent the same afternoon and drew 43,300 views for it. The most-shared critical post conceded the history too. @SmashJT answered that the 2019 flags were as unwelcome then as these are now. The fight over the emblems was never about whether Gears had done it before. It was about whether players wanted a fresh round of it in the first new mainline game in years.
Within a day the emblems had become the container for every other grievance. New character Mags Carter is shown to be a lesbian through collectibles and a cutscene photo, and critics folded her into the same argument. The credits thank Hit Detection, a consultancy that sells cultural and sensitivity evaluations. Players compiled lists of what the game lacked at launch: chainsaw duels, meat shields, private matches, leaderboards. One player’s complaint ran that the studio found room for 20 emblems but none of those. A wave of Steam reviews branded the game woke, and by October 5 the user score had slid to 75 percent positive.
Stories of heavy-handed moderation followed. One player posted that typing “wt is this lgbt crap” in chat earned a ban labeled “Identity Based Discrimination.” A community “LGBTQ+” tag topped the Steam store page on October 5 and then vanished, and @Pirat_Nation said the developers removed it. Microsoft has not commented. On October 14, Nexus Mods banned a pride-flag replacement mod called “Dad’s Home.” @Pirat_Nation’s post on the ban drew 970,000 views, and Nexus restated its policy in a post of its own: “we are for inclusivity, we are for diversity.”
Through all of it, The Coalition and Xbox said nothing about the emblems. The studio’s public comments that week addressed the missing multiplayer features and left the pride content alone.
The silence left room for exaggeration, and critics supplied it. Posts claimed 52 gender flags, 89 identities and 37 made-up genders. All three numbers are wrong. The count is 20, and anyone repeating the larger figures hands the other side an easy rebuttal.
Alinea Analytics estimated only 230,000 copies sold in launch week, 62,000 on Xbox and 168,000 on Steam, against 1.7 million Game Pass players. Steam’s early-access peak was about 20,374 concurrent players. Microsoft said Gears of War 3 sold more than 3 million copies in its first week in 2011, and Gears of War 2 passed 5 million by May 2009. Neither of those games competed with a subscription service, and the $500 million budget figure may include studio-wide engine and tools work that other projects will reuse.
No data isolates a cause. E-Day launched on Game Pass, which the media claims turns would-be buyers into subscribers. The actual game carried $70 and $100 price points and has no PS5 version. The multiplayer only game shipped without features that earlier games had. Each of those is a plausible reason for a soft launch in addition to this, but the combination is a deadly loss for the company.
Microsoft holds the real sales data. When it reviews the numbers, will it count the emblems as a cause of the stumble or treat them as a footnote?
This is about a video game?