Gears of War Realm

According to gamer news site Gamasutra, Microsoft has issued an announcement that Gears of War has sold over 2 million copies worldwide in the past month, making it the fastest selling Xbox title yet.

Here’s a list of sales stats that Microsoft stated for Gears of War.

• Over two million sales world wide.
• Over one million copies sold in the US alone.
• Fastest selling Xbox title in history, beating Halo 2′s old record.
• 94.2% Average Rating on GameRankings
• 7 Million Achievements Unlocked in six weeks
• Gold Xbox Live membership has grown 50% since launch
• One million unique players online
• Ten million online games

Congrats to the people at Epic Games and Microsoft for this great achievement. I’m sure the allocades are not over yet!

[From Gamasutra]

Back during the Chicago Match Made in Hell event I talked with Epic’s Mike Capps about downloadable content. He said the team was working on some stuff, new maps for sure, but was unaware of the pricing structure since that is up to Microsoft.

Well now two months later it seems it’s still in the works, and if Epic gets their way it’ll be free to us gamers. According to an interview at the Spike Video Game Awards, Mike Capps again stated they are working on it and that they want it to be free. Here’s the quote:

“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.” – Dr. Mike Capps – President of Epic Games

I hope Epic gets their way and continues their efforts to give away free content to the fans of their games. This is a huge thing they do with the Unreal series, and to continue with the Gears of War series would be a positive influence on the game and the community as well. But this time around Microsoft is the publisher, so they get final word on the downloadable content. There is hope though, because Microsoft gave away Halo 2 add-on maps for free when they were sponsored by Mountain Dew who is activily trying to capture the gamer market for their line of sodas. Maybe they can get chainsaw maker Stihl to sponsor the free addons.

[From Xbox 360 Fanboy and Team Xbox]

So there is a lot of talk around the community since Emergence Day that Gears of War doesn’t play properly on some user’s Xbox 360 consoles. If you too have this problem, you are not alone it seems.

Some bloggers over at Xbox 360 Fanboy and IGN have put up some information (and video) of the issue, along with ways they prevented or solved the problem. There are also lots of user comments on both sites telling of similar issues. It seems you either need to replace the Gears of War disc or theXbox 360 itself to solve the problem. Sadly it seems Microsoft isn’t being incredibly helpful with the issue, while Epic Games (who is not at fault) is trying to keep passing the issues back to Microsoft who are pushing it off on them.

Here is what Mark Rein, Epic Game’s VP had to say about the issue in the Epic Games Forums.

Guys — we don’t make the discs, Microsoft does that. Microsoft is also the publisher of the game which means they do all the support and testing. If some Microsoft support person is telling you to call Epic please ask them for their name and phone number and we’ll pass that along to Microsoft to handle because that absolutely should not be happening. We have no facilities for end-user support other than this forum and even then all we can do is listen and pass you back to Microsoft.

We especially can’t help you with hardware problems like scratches on your disc or unreadable discs. We don’t make the disc drives either

Lets hope Microsoft can start handling this issue properly so all of you getting copies of Gears of War under the tree this holiday season can get right to playing without issues.

Last month, to celebrate the launch of Gears of War we held an Emergence Month Contest. We offered up a Collectors Edition copy of Gears of War along with two Limited Edition faceplates from E3 2006 and a bunch of t-shirts that we collected from the Match Made in Hell event.

Those who wanted to enter the contest had to put a banner advertising the game and our website to generate an entry for the contest. Here are the winners, along with the number of unique visitors they got.

Vicken J. from Glendale, CA took first place with 232 hits.

Nick D. from Toronto, Canada took second with 210 hits.

Adrian J. from Bishop, TX took third place with 143 hits.

Geoff G. from Fairport, NY took fourth place with 112 hits.

and

William N. from Salem, OR took home fifth place with 83 hits.

Congrats to the winners! I hope you enjoy your prizes, they should be arriving shortly!

Stay tuned for a few new contests that we’re going to start up here soon for some extra GoW T-Shirts we have laying around. The contests will be for contributions to the Gears of War Realm Wiki. Details on that will be forth coming.

Epic Games President Mark Rein has announced on the Epic Games Forums that a patch for users of VGA cables on non-widescreen monitors is on the way. The problem resulted in a squished screen on non-widescreen TVs.

But the patch has to go through some levels of certification before it’s released to the masses, so because of this they will probably roll the fix into the next update for the game. No word on when that is happening, or what it will contain, but we know we are all anxiously waiting for it’s arrival.

[via Xbox 360 Fanboy]