'Gears 5' Topples 'Fortnite' After One Year As Most Played Xbox Game
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Featured Image Credit: Microsoft
Fortnite has found itself at the top of many a pile since Epic Games first launched the incredibly popular free-to-play battle royale back in 2017. The colourful shooter quickly became a pop-culture phenomenon, and has been referenced in everything from Avengers Endgame to the latest music video from blink-182, for some reason. For better or worse - and some people would certainly argue that it's for worse - Fortnite is probably the biggest game in the world right now, and has been for some time.
Fortunately for those that are getting more than a little sick of seeing the battle royale top every chart, a challenger has appeared to dethrone Fortnite, at least on Xbox One. Since the Summer of 2018, Fortnite has been at the top of the weekly charts for Xbox Live's most played games, every week. However, a user over on ResetEra has pointed out that the Epic Games behemoth has finally been toppled by The Coalition's recently-released Gears 5.
While it's true enough that both games are third-person shooters, the similarities between Fortnite and Gears 5 really do end there. One is a bright, family-friendly battle royale in with minimal gore and the option to dab till your heart's content, and the other is a gritty, dark shooter in which you can rip people apart with a chainsaw as crimson mist sprays all over the shop.
It's incredibly impressive that Gears 5 has managed to dethrone Fortnite for a number of reasons, not least because Epic's title is such an established and massively popular release, and has been for over a year. We also have to consider that the Gears 5 player count is technically split across two versions (the Ultimate and standard editions), meaning the Ultimate Edition's place at the top of the charts is doubly admirable.
Then there's the fact that Gears 5 has managed to do what massive releases like Call of Duty Black Ops 4, Red Dead Online, Battlefield 5, Forza Horizon 4, and even Apex Legends all failed to do in toppling Fortnite. Granted, most of those games were also available on other systems meaning that the player count would be split further, but it really is great to see the Gears of War franchise return with such a bang.
In our own review, which you can see above, we called Gears 5 a "flawed but enjoyable entry into the franchise that takes all the learnings from the previous games, and sprinkles in some much-needed features and light open-world RPG ingredients to deliver something fans of the franchise will truly love."
Topics: epic games, Fortnite
