It appears that Marcus Fenix (Gear's really cool main character for the unitiated) is going around making Microsoft look silly, but in a good way as the heavily anticipated 360 exclusive managed to shatter Microsoft's sales prediction for the game. It's always a good sign when a publisher predicts to sell 1 million copies of a game that released on November 7th, 2006 by the end of the year only to have it instead sell 2 million worldwide within 6 weeks.

Gears of War as anyone should be aware of before its release was easily one of the most hyped new ip games in recent memory. So incredible was this game's hype that people already started making comparisons to the juggernaut that is Halo. The hype had reached such a climax that many thought this game simply wouldn't be able to live up to the monumental hype, but surprisingly it did and with flying colors. It was long predicted to be a major system seller for the 360 and even after the game managed to prove it was just as good as it was hyped to be people were still skeptical that it would sell like Microsoft had hoped. Well one things sure as of now is that they were certainly right to be skeptical as the game is by no means selling like Microsoft had hoped it's selling even better.

It's truly saying something when according to the November NPD data a new unproven franchise like Gears of War can just show up out of nowhere on a console with a max USA install base of around 3.8 million can manage to outsell the 12th iteration of a monster franchise like Final Fantasy on a console with a USA install base of about 42 million.

Microsoft has reported that Xbox Live subscriptions per day have jumped an amazing 50% since the games release. Epic is also extremely excited about the game's success and has promised to literally spoil Gears of War owners with numerous free downloadable content. To quote the President of Epic Games Mike Capps

"We started long before the game ever came out; we started on the next stuff. We always take care of our customers, we always give them stuff for free and we're going to keep doing that forever. This is how we do it man, this is Epic.”

"We've always held high hopes for 'Gears of War,' but we never expected such an overwhelmingly positive response from critics and gamers all over the world," "I can't describe how stoked our team is right now. Our fans can absolutely count on Epic to keep delivering new gameplay through Xbox Live."

I guess this means we can look forward to those Multi-Player enchancements everyone has been begging for!

Some other statistics to absorb are the fact that since the game's release there have been over a million unique gamers engaging in 10 million online gameplay sessions and it's the first title since the 360's release to remove the mighty Halo 2 from the top spot as the most played Xbox Live game. Its the second fastest selling Microsoft published game ever after Halo 2 and it has managed to do it with a fraction of the install base the original Xbox had during Halo 2's release. I don't need to say how impressive this all is just look at the numbers. There are also reports that the game is doing remarkably well in Asia. If anyone is interested in Gears of War then I guess there is no better time than this holiday season to jump in... everyone else is.

Source: WorthPlaying

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