The Gears of War: E-Day open beta has re-emerged for its second go, and once again, the shooter has set another series record on Steam.
Last week, the Gears of War: E-Day beta went live exclusively for pre-orderers and Game Pass Ultimate subscribers, but that didn't stop the taste test from beating every other game in the series when it came to concurrent Steam player numbers. Now that the beta is finally open to everyone on PC and Xbox Series X|S, the chainsaw-gunning prequel has pulled off the trick for a second week in a row.
About eight hours ago, the open beta managed to horde together 22,084 Steam players at the same time. The first leg of the beta pulled a crowd of 18,000 concurrent players on Steam, which was already bigger than every other game in the series that's released on the platform, including Gears of War: Reloaded (just under 5,000), Gears Tactics (7,351 players), and Gears 5 (over 10,000).
Of course, those numbers don't include the Xbox Series X|S and Xbox PC players who roadie ran into the fray. According to Rhys Elliott, head of market research at Alinea Analytics, about 1.2 million Xbox console players tried out the first stretch of the beta last week. That crowd will no doubt get much larger as more people gain entry.
Should you be interested in shotgunning bug monsters into meat chunk confetti, the E-Day open beta is live until August 17. The early look includes a tutorial, the PvP Versus mode, and the massive PvE Horde Siege mode that has three different squads tackling side objectives and fending off waves of enemies in crumbling city streets.
