It’s a Victory Royale for Xbox Game Studios, as its recently-launched title Gears 5 has officially surpassed Fortnite as the most-played Xbox Live game – a title it’s held for a whole year.
Epic Games’ Fortnite has appeared on the top spot of Xbox Live’s most-played titles since summer 2018, but no longer.
As posted to ResetEra [via GamingBolt], Gears 5 Ultimate Edition, which has been available to play since September 5, has swooped in to steal the crown, which is seriously impressive when you stop to consider the games over the past 12 months that haven’t managed to do that.
Red Dead Redemption 2, Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 and Apex Legends are just a few of the heavy-hitters over the last few months, and yet none of these behemoths have achieved what Gears 5 has managed to do.
Even more eyebrow-raising is the fact that it’s the Ultimate Edition of Gears 5 which has taken first place – something that’s counted separately from the regular edition.
Gears 5 has received nothing but praise since it launched just a few days ago, with players calling it the best narrative experience that’s exclusive to Xbox.
Over on Twitter, The Coalition is celebrating the game’s success, with top dog Rod Fergusson tweeting: “Keep thinking about this amazing cast and Tom Bissell’s writing and the story we were able to tell in #Gears5 So proud of them and miss them greatly! #LoveYouAll“
In related news, a recently-discovered glitch has turned Gears 5 into something Xbox (probably) didn’t want us to see – the game as a first person shooter.
A Twitter user/Gears fan by the name of ArturiusTheMage captured a video of the odd occurrence, and everyone’s asking the same question: why isn’t this an official game mode?
Imagine how many more people would actually give this game a try if they added this option?
— Tyler North (@killershears) September 9, 2019
It’s not entirely clear how the glitch came to happen. In the clip, which you can check out in the tweet above, ArturiusTheMage looks down the Longshot scope which seems to cause the gun model to clip and glitch.
The sleuths over on Reddit believe that the strange bug might be down to a scrapped feature, with one Redditor writing: “Honestly, looks like something that was built into the game for the developers to play around with. The option to access it was removed, but the framework was still there. Someone managed to trigger the FPS flag to on by accident.”
Featured Image Credit: Xbox Game Studios