Gears 6 Team Ramps Up Development With New Wave of Hirings

[Gamernyc78]

Gears 6 Team Ramps Up Development With New Wave of Hirings

The Coalition is currently busy with Gears 6, recently hiring as many as eight developers to bolster the development of this game.

tech4gamers.com

Story Highlights

• Gears 5 was released in 2019, so The Coalition’s next mainline title has been in development for a while.
• The studio hired eight new developers in December 2023 and January 2024.
• This likely means that Gears 6 is moving into the final stages of development as work on the project picks up the pace.
• An official reveal could arrive in 2024.

The Coalition is currently all hands on deck developing Gears 6. While the studio has yet to announce the game officially, job listings and leaks have practically confirmed its existence, creating excitement in the Xbox fandom.

The team behind this game has recently gone on a hiring spree, hinting that development is moving along nicely, with the game potentially entering the final stages of production before the inevitable announcement.

Why it matters: Gears is one of the key first-party IPs owned by Xbox, but the series has been missing for over three years and is yet to receive a launch on the current-gen Xbox Series S|X consoles.



As shared by Idle Sloth, The Coalition has just hired a total of eight developers recently. The new employees include a Senior Lighting Artist, a Technical Gameplay Designer, an Associate Producer, and more.

What makes this hiring spree so interesting is the fact that all of these roles have been filled up in December 2023 or January 2024, suggesting that The Coalition has just moved to a new stage of development.

This likely means that Gears 6 has progressed toward the latter half of its development, opening up the possibility of an official reveal later this year. The game is allegedly arriving in 2026, so an official reveal should be ready two years before this date.

It is also worth noting that a Gears developer’s tweet from December 2023 said:

“See you in 2024 Gears fam.”

 

[Nhomnhom]

I wonder if this is already a PS6 game if they are ramping up this late.

 

[Gamernyc78]

I wonder if this is already a PS6 game if they are ramping up this late.

Word right lol let me stop I wouldn't care even though to me it's their best game.

 

[Nhomnhom]

Word right lol let me stop I wouldn't care even though to me it's their best game.

With how unlucky Xbots are MS might finally start releasing some bangers when they make their way to PlayStation. It would be the most hilarious outcome possible.

 

[Gamernyc78]

With how unlucky Xbots are MS might finally start releasing some bangers when they make their way to PlayStation. It would be the most hilarious outcome possible.

Waiting for Gears until 2026 is rough! Like more than halfway past the gen mark now you getting games? Thts dumb planning. They should have pulled a Sony and padded it out with a dope Gears Remake or something. Tht would have been popular.

 

[flaccidsnake]

I don't know if MS realizes how fucked this franchise is narratively. They did a hollywood-style millennial reboot+sequel with Gears4, and that game is not widely accessible. The PC release is trapped on the garbage Windows store. The Xbox version is native to Xbone, which was unsuccessful.

At the very least they have to get this whole franchise available on Steam. If they can do that, they should put it on PS5 as well.

 

[Evilnemesis8]

Waiting for Gears until 2026 is rough! Like more than halfway past the gen mark now you getting games? Thts dumb planning. They should have pulled a Sony and padded it out with a dope Gears Remake or something. Tht would have been popular.

According to Jeff Grubb they had planned to do "in-between" game(s) before Gears 6 to avoid precisely that problem of not being there until 2026.

During today’s Game Mess Mornings broadcast, industry insider Jeff Grubb confirmed that The Coalition cancelled two unannounced games, with one intended to train studio staff on Unreal Engine 5. However, that game was considered expendable as the studio had already worked with Unreal 5 on The Matrix Awakens.

It does seem like they feel like 'well, we are up to speed because we worked on [The Matrix Awakens],' and so they have cancelled that smaller project as well as another project," reported Grubb. "So there's been two games cancelled there. This was all reflected in the layoffs that happened at Microsoft that did hit The Coalition a little bit, but the studio is now going to move on fully to Gears 6."

I don't know about two game cancellations, but one is for sure the case. We know a lot of Xbox studios were asked to cut headcount due to the larger Microsoft layoffs plans of 10k employees. They weren't hit as big as the under performing 343 of course, but just like we saw the Insomniac leak, even higher performer studios might be asked to make some cuts if it's a company wide affair.

This is because, in these massive layoffs, you can't just hit a magical number and start doing massive cuts to ONLY the underperforming teams, because then you might just cripple their ability to actually make any product at all. So even good teams/studios will be asked to trim down the fat as well to a lesser extent.

 

[Gamernyc78]

According to Jeff Grubb they had planned to do "in-between" game(s) before Gears 6 to avoid precisely that problem of not being there until 2026.





I don't know about two game cancellations, but one is for sure the case. We know a lot of Xbox studios were asked to cut headcount due to the larger Microsoft layoffs plans of 10k employees. They weren't hit as big as the under performing 343 of course, but just like we saw the Insomniac leak, even higher performer studios might be asked to make some cuts if it's a company wide affair.

This is because, in these massive layoffs, you can't just hit a magical number and start doing massive cuts to ONLY the underperforming teams, because then you might just cripple their ability to actually make any product at all. So even good teams/studios will be asked to trim down the fat as well to a lesser extent.

They should have done the lesser of two evils. Not coming out with anything in between erodes mind share and brings no influx of potential gp subscriptions or revenue. They are just idiots all around. The whole gp strategy is just really destroying them internally and hamstringing them.

 

[Evilnemesis8]

They should have done the lesser of two evils. Not coming out with anything in between erodes mind share and brings no influx of potential gp subscriptions or revenue. They are just idiots all around. The whole gp strategy is just really destroying them internally and hamstringing them.

Actually, I highly suspect the reason why they were doing smaller titles in the first place was because of GP. Xbox needs a greater cadence of software to entice people to subcribe. So this meant they there probably wasn't many choice but to cancel these projects and put everything into Gears 6, which for sure wasn't the plan. I can only imagine what they viewed other options as worse than this one.

We'll never know though, because we can't see what was asked of Xbox in terms of employees they had to layoff.

 

[Nhomnhom]

Waiting for Gears until 2026 is rough! Like more than halfway past the gen mark now you getting games? Thts dumb planning. They should have pulled a Sony and padded it out with a dope Gears Remake or something. Tht would have been popular.

2026 is being very optimistic, when was the last time MS announced and released a triple A game in the span of 2 years?

Actually, I highly suspect the reason why they were doing smaller titles in the first place was because of GP. Xbox needs a greater cadence of software to entice people to subcribe. So this meant they there probably wasn't many choice but to cancel these projects and put everything into Gears 6, which for sure wasn't the plan. I can only imagine what they viewed other options as worse than this one.

We'll never know though, because we can't see what was asked of Xbox in terms of employees they had to layoff.

MS is so bad at making games that they are even bad at that, DLC, episodic, expansions and multiplayer games were the type of games MS needed for Gamepass to work.

The guys in charge of Xbox are a bunch bozos that get away with Xbox not being important enough to MS for them to really care about how it's being handled. Hardly anything they tried was well executed.

 

[Evilnemesis8]

2026 is being very optimistic, when was the last time MS announced and released a triple A game in the span of 2 years?

Funny you should ask that, looking at : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_video_games
I'm fairly sure the last triple A game that did that for XGS is... Gears 5, lmao.
Game was announced at E3 2018 and released September 2019.

 

[Nhomnhom]

Funny you should ask that, looking at : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_video_games
I'm fairly sure the last triple A game that did that for XGS is... Gears 5, lmao.
Game was announced at E3 2018 and released September 2019.

2019 was a long time ago, games are taking a lot longer now, specially MS ones.

Not to mention that from Gears 4 to Gears 5 they were not making the jump to a new console.

 

[Evilnemesis8]

2019 was a long time ago, games are taking a lot longer now, specially MS ones.

Not to mention that from Gears 4 to Gears 5 they were not making the jump to a new console.

Obviously. I am no time wizard, I just found it a funny coincidence and that there was a precedent and the last game was the previous entry of this very franchise.

Trying to guess a release date for a video game is just a fool's errand, I'm not in the business of that.
If I can't pre-load the game on my PC/console, I'm still not sure any announced or soon to be released game is going to be playable to me.
Too many internal delays and known delays in the industry, and with the post-covid course correction in 2023(maybe 2024 as well?) things are super in flux for many games right now.

 

[Airbus]