Now I’ve got your attention I wanted to say Hi to anyone still playing this legendary series!
I don’t even know if NBK was or is a thing but I wasn’t part of the real NBK my mate decided to call us NBK back on Gears 1, that’s the days of high school for me and Jesus was the first three games mega! Absolute childhood staples along with Forza before Horizon, Test Drive Unlimited, COD 3 but Gears was the one!
I completed Gears 5 campaign soon as I got a Series S and game pass, late 2021 and never really played the multiplayer but after countless attempts at CODs, Horizon 5 which is diar compared to 4, no more Motorsport 7 on game pass and nothing else other than Rocket League that’s entertaining for more than an hour I thought id give it a go and to be honest I haven’t been interested in a single player game since Fallout 3, tried Cyberpunk and turned it off after an hour or two, spent 15 hours on Valhalla, similar hours on Dying Light 2 and nothings entertaining but I tried Gears multiplayer and my god did the nostalgia come back and the mechanics are so sick, I’m terrible but it’s genuinely f**ckin fun!
If anyone wants to add me so we can have some games in party chat add me, JoShMiLLeR9099, usually play late Friday and Saturday nights UK time and I’ll be having a few beers so adults only but I reckon half of you lot if not more are 30+
From what I’ve seen on here there’s a lot of negativity towards MP and Gears 5 in general but its not that bad IMO, I’ve played worse games.
@WD_Hawkeye
NBK, Natural Born Killers, I thought clans and stuff would still be big or remembered, they might have never of been anything special, lets pretend I didn’t talk nonsense
Clans were such an oversaturated thing back in the Xbox 360 era that practically none of them were memorable. I was part of a Halo clan called KoG (Kings Of Gaming). They were a dime a dozen back then.
I was trying to find the original members of NBK, (a early/mid 2007 gb team) and accidentally found a wild way of showcasing GoWs fall from grace.
2907 ranked teams(each team having minimum four players, and the overwhelming majority have 6+) to go along with 7500~ unranked teams, which is at minimum 1 player but sometimes more)
Going with the most conservative estimate this is 19,000 players playing Gears of War competitively. This is like if 19,000 people were playing scrims or wagers — the number of people who even know what gamebattles is/was, let alone actually wanted to play it is minuscule. This is 1% of the overall population of the games multiplayer, and it’s 19,000~ people. There aren’t 19,000 players actively playing Gears 5 versus now, nor were there 2 years ago.
These are mid 2007 figures — not the series at it’s height of popularity.
This is how far the series fell.
edit: It gets far worse when you take into account how far fewer players on Xbox Live there were in general. 30-50x as many people playing GoW, and the overall number of players playing any game was far lower.
Halo won’t work the same because it was never as big on gamebattles as GoW despite being the bigger overall game. Tsquared being on something like 264million bottles of Dr. Pepper is a great showcase of how popular it once was.
This is about a month after Halo 3s release, and the (at the time one year old GoW) was still more popular on gb. GoW was a legitimate competitor in terms of population count even thought it ultimately fell short of Halo. There’s no shame in being #2 to the marquee franchise
Something I found that puts into perspective is that even CoD4 in summer 08 — the height of heights for the most popular game — was still within GoW1s summer 07 numbers on gb.
edit: I forgot to mention that with these population figures, I’m only counting North America. The 19,000 player estimate in GoW1 is only for North America, meaning the figure could be double if every other region were accounted for.
Str8 Rippin, Final Boss, Ogre Twins, all of those guys
It all had so much more backbone far as sponsorship/well known names yet GoW was still bringing in more numbers competitively is crazy.
I don’t really get the source of its blow up besides it just being Gears but I know Its suffering to its many competitors now and days.
I’m sure the Halo players who remember the highs of Halo2 and 3 feel the same, but their game is in a much better state in terms of player count and cultural relevance than ours is.
I think two things could happen; either we go the route of SOCOM, which was a relevant Halo 2 competitor that fell completely into irrelevance and has no players, no relevance, and no longer exists — or we go the route of Rainbow Six, as in get lucky via TC making a good video game and supporting it.
Wow someone does remember! That echos what you’ve just said I thought it would be full of OG players from the first one who went into these tournaments, I guess a lot of people grew up and stopped playing games altogether, a lot of the originals.
I kinda hate looking at numbers like these because–yeah Gears has peaked. Halo peaked. COD peaked. Siege peaked. Xbox peaked. Playstation peaked. Rome peaked.
Things are popular–then they aren’t. But we don’t look at someone playing ACDC on vinyl and tell them “Oh man they fell off a while ago, it’s all about BTS now.”
The majority of people here genuinely believe GoW has always been this niche game that only 200 people(125 of which live in mexico) have ever heard of. It shouldn’t be forgotten that this IP once competed with what are today mainstream titles — it was itself a mainstream title. GoW’s falloff was much sharper than all it’s peers, and there’s nothing inherent to the IP which causes it — it’s poor decision-making. It’s developer failure.
Also, AC/DC are more comparable to BTS in terms of popularity today than you think.
It’s kind of like how GoW was less popular than Halo/CoD, but it was still close enough to be respectable.
