Gears of War Reloaded price: the $9.99 week is long gone

Gears of War: E-Day unlocked worldwide on 6 October 2026, and because it is a prequel to the very first game, the obvious next question for anyone who finishes it is where to pick up the rest of the series. The Gears of War Reloaded price is the one that matters for that, because Reloaded is the first game — and our price record says this is the worst week of the last four months to buy it.

Read on 7 October 2026, Playze has taken 22 daily readings of the cheapest listing for Gears of War: Reloaded since 19 June. The lowest of them was $9.99, on 20 August 2026. The last reading we have is 22 September. Since then every keyshop listing we were tracking has disappeared, and the only prices left on the page are the two official ones, neither of them discounted.

Reloaded is the 2025 remaster of the 2006 original — the game E-Day leads directly into. (Official Steam screenshot)

What the Gears of War Reloaded price record shows

The shape is unusually clean for a game this old. Our record opens on 19 June at the base price, drops to half that at the end of June, returns to base in July, then bottoms out at $9.99 on a single Steam reading on 20 August. From 3 September a keyshop listing settled in around the low thirties and drifted down week by week, reaching $27.40 on 22 September.

Then it stops. Not because we stopped reading, but because there was nothing cheap left to read. Through the whole run-up to E-Day the discounted stock thinned out, and by the time the prequel launched the cheapest thing we could see was the publisher's own price. Check the Gears of War: Reloaded page for today's figure rather than trusting any number in an article — but expect it to be the full one.

The one real cut landed in every region at once

This is the detail that tells you what kind of discount to wait for. Look up Reloaded in the United States, Canada, Australia and Poland and you get four different base prices and four different recorded lows — and in all four, the low sits exactly 75% below the base price. Same percentage, four currencies.

That is the signature of a single global publisher discount rather than a keyshop undercutting on its own margin. It means the cheap window on Reloaded is not something that drifts open; it arrives when Microsoft decides it does, everywhere simultaneously, and then closes. If you missed August, the next real chance is the next 75% event, not a slow slide back down.

Reloaded's official trailer, from PlayStation's channel for the PS5 release — the remaster shipped on PS5, Xbox and PC on the same day.

Gears 5 and Gears Tactics did the same thing

It is not just Reloaded. Gears 5 has 55 readings on our record since 18 June, and its floor was $4.49 on 8 August 2026, on Steam. Gears Tactics has 68 readings and bottomed at $6.79 in the first days of July 2026. Both now sit several times above those lows.

The Steam Autumn Sale has been running since 1 October and ends on the 8th, which makes the Tactics reading from opening day worth repeating: on 1 October 2026 our tracker recorded Steam selling Gears Tactics at its base price. A six-year-old turn-based spin-off, in a week-long storewide sale, with no cut at all. Gears 5's official price is likewise unchanged from base as of today.

Gears 5 holds 71% positive from 25,343 Steam reviews and an 82 on Metacritic — the strongest multiplayer package in the series. (Official Steam screenshot)

E-Day's own cheapest day was before it came out

Pre-order buyers will not enjoy this one. Our record for Gears of War: E-Day runs from 19 June and holds 29 readings. The cheapest was $46.00, on 22 September 2026 — a fortnight before launch, at a keyshop — and nothing since has come close. The readings either side of the launch are all higher.

That matches what we found when we looked at pre-order pricing across the board: the keyshop floor for a big release tends to arrive in the weeks before the game is out, not after it. If you were waiting for launch day to decide, launch day was the expensive option.

E-Day is set during Emergence Day itself, which is why it leads straight into the events of Reloaded. (Official Steam screenshot)

What Game Pass actually covers here

Before you buy any of the four, check what you are already paying for. E-Day is on Game Pass from day one. Reloaded and Tactics are in the catalogue too. And Gears 5 is listed on Microsoft's own store as included with Game Pass Essential, Premium and Ultimate, as well as PC Game Pass.

So the entire PC-playable Gears series sits behind one subscription. If the plan is to play E-Day and then work backwards over a month or two, one month of the appropriate Game Pass tier covers all four, and that is worth weighing against buying even one of them at the prices we are recording today. That is not the usual advice — plenty of Game Pass games are worth owning outright — but with the back catalogue sitting at or near base price, the comparison is not a close one.

Gears Tactics is set twelve years before the original game, and is the one entry that plays nothing like the rest. (Official Steam screenshot)

Is E-Day itself worth buying rather than streaming?

Pure Xbox's launch-day roundup put E-Day's Metacritic average at 88, with scores running from a 10/10 at Pure Xbox to a 6/10 at The Guardian. The praise is consistent and specific: critics called it the best the series has ever felt to play, with a world-class campaign. The complaint is equally consistent — The Guardian's verdict was that the game is safe and repetitive outside the fighting, showing all its ideas in the opening hours.

One caveat that matters for a purchase decision: both Versus and the new Horde Siege mode were locked off during the review period, so that 88 is a verdict on the campaign alone. If multiplayer is why you would buy Gears, nobody had tested it when the scores went out. That is a good reason to play it on the subscription for a month and buy later, once the modes you care about have been in public hands.

The E-Day launch trailer, mirrored on IGN's channel rather than uploaded by Xbox.

If you are buying anyway, buy carefully

All four of these games appear on keyshops as well as official stores, and the gap can be large — that is exactly how Reloaded got to $9.99 and Gears 5 to $4.49 on our record. It is also where the risk lives. Our guide to whether keyshops are safe covers the checks worth doing, and buying Xbox games cheaply covers the regional and gift-card routes that actually work. Both apply here.

One Gears-specific note: Reloaded is the remaster of the original campaign and holds 62% positive from 4,263 Steam reviews, which is Mixed. A lot of that is multiplayer and technical complaint rather than the campaign itself, but it is worth knowing before you pay full price for a 2006 game. Tactics, by contrast, sits at 75% positive from 7,784 reviews and an 80 on Metacritic.

Reloaded runs the 2006 campaign at 4K with modernised multiplayer, and sits at Mixed on Steam. (Official Steam screenshot)

The bottom line

Do not buy Gears of War: Reloaded this week. Our record has it at a quarter of its base price seven weeks ago, that cut arrived simultaneously in every region we track, and the keyshop listings that softened the blow in September have gone. Play E-Day and the back catalogue on Game Pass for a month instead, decide which of the four you actually want to keep, and buy that one at the next 75% event. If you only ever buy one of them outright, make it Gears 5 — it has the deepest discount history on our record, the strongest review numbers of the three older games, and the multiplayer suite the series is actually known for.