All of the numbers below are Alinea Analytics estimates. Kotaku notes that Microsoft has not corroborated them. Treat them as a third-party model, not a sales report.
What the estimates say
- Copies sold: About 230,000 in total, with 168,000 on Steam and 62,000 on Xbox.
- Game Pass access: Alinea estimates 1.7 million people accessed E-Day through a subscription instead of a copy.
- Early-access upgrades: Of those 1.7 million, 722K are estimated to have paid for the upgrade. Alinea says another 250K early-access upgrades sold between the review embargo lifting on October 1 and the full release.
- Revenue: Kotaku reports roughly $37 million so far, about $26 million of it from Xbox. Alinea's report puts Steam at about $11 million.
- Paying audience: Alinea says that counting the 722K upgrades, nearly 950K people paid something for E-Day.
Copies, subscription players and upgrades are different things. An upgrade is not a copy, and a Game Pass player is not a sale. Adding them together to reach a "total sold" figure would be wrong, and so would swapping 320,000 in for 230,000.
The pricing context
Xbox's own store page lists the figures. The Standard Edition is $69.99 and the Premium Edition is $99.99, with a $30 Premium upgrade for people who already own the Standard Edition. The upgrade matters because of the schedule Microsoft announced. Microsoft's launch announcement says Premium Edition players could start up to five days early on October 1. The same Xbox Wire post says Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass members could join the fight starting October 6. Alinea's $30 upgrade figure refers to that early-access path for Game Pass members.
Alinea's argument
Elliott's case is that day-one Game Pass access cuts into full-price purchases on Xbox. He notes that Xbox sold 62K copies against 722K Premium upgrades, nearly 12 upgrades for every Xbox copy. Normally you can't see what a Game Pass player would have paid. The $30 upgrade, he says, shows 722K people were willing to spend real money.
He puts upgrade revenue at about $21.7M. If three-quarters of that group had bought the game outright, he says, revenue would be nearly $40M. That is a hypothetical, not realized revenue.
Caveats
- The ratio is not lost sales. The 12-to-1 comparison sets upgrades against copies. It does not measure how many subscribers would otherwise have paid $69.99.
- The counterfactual is Elliott's opinion. The sales data cannot show what subscribers would have done without day-one access.
- Game Pass has other value. Alinea itself acknowledges that Game Pass brings in meaningful recurring revenue and that E-Day adds value for hundreds of thousands of subscribers. These figures say nothing about subscriber growth, retention or the service's overall profitability.
- The PC side is partly hidden. Steam is visible to analysts. Microsoft Store and Game Pass PC activity is modeled, so those parts carry more uncertainty.
Playtime on Xbox versus Steam
Alinea reports different playtime distributions. It says 54% of Xbox players had played five hours or less, against 32% on Steam. Over 15 hours was 19% on Xbox against 33% on Steam. Alinea says 17% of Xbox players spent under an hour, against 6% on Steam. It calls this the Game Pass "try and churn" effect and says it is not cause for alarm. Short sessions are expected when a game costs nothing extra to try. Subscriber and buyer populations also differ, so the comparison is not like for like.
Alinea also says 86% of Xbox E-Day players had played Gears 5 and 76% had played Gears 4. It lists Fortnite, Roblox and Call of Duty among the most-played games that month. Those are audience estimates, not Microsoft telemetry.
Speculation about Game Pass policy
Kotaku closes by saying Microsoft will have to pull day-one first-party releases from Game Pass. That is a conclusion drawn from one analyst's estimates for one title, not something the data establishes. Alinea does say Xbox has already pulled Call of Duty from day-one Game Pass, and says rumors about wider removal have been dismissed by Microsoft so far. That context is Alinea's account and was not verified separately here.
Alinea's data does not prove that day-one availability is the problem. Another reading is that a flagship shooter with a niche audience simply did modest numbers on Steam. Earlier Alinea estimates, from before launch, put Steam at about 120K copies. They also put it at more than double Halo: Campaign Evolved over a similar period. That is a reminder that "soft" depends on the benchmark.
What this means for Xbox and PC players
- Multiplatform release: E-Day shipped on Xbox Series X|S, Xbox on PC, and Steam. Xbox Play Anywhere gives shared progression and achievements across Xbox and PC. The Steam split is one of the few outside windows into how a Microsoft first-party game performs off its own storefront.
- Pricing experiments: Early-access upgrades are a tool for monetizing Game Pass members. Whether Microsoft changes day-one policy remains unannounced.
- Reading the headlines: Treat any analyst figure as an estimate. Check whether a number counts copies, upgrades or players, and which storefronts it covers.
If Microsoft publishes its own numbers, they will replace these estimates. Until then, 230,000 copies is Alinea's figure for the first week or so, and the 320,000 in Kotaku's headline does not match its own sources.