Gears of War 3 has been available to pre-order for just over a week now and has already surpassed one million pre-orders according to games developer Epic. This has made the game the most popular pre-order title of all time, which is fairly impressive when you consider it doesn’t launch until September 20th, 2011.
So how have Epic managed this? Well, a combination of clever marketing and several waves of online Beta testing seems to have done the trick. All of the gamers we have spoken with seem to be impressed with the online gameplay which has provided enough incentive for them to pre-order GOW3 already.
The boffins at Microsoft and Epic made the clever decsion to run the Beta trials on dedicated servers for the first time, a good job when you consider gamers racked up an impressive 249 years worth of online gameplay between them – those servers must have been hammered but gamers faced very little problems.
“An overwhelming success – we can’t thank the fans enough,” said Epic Games Design Director Cliff Bleszinski. “While the beta was a fun way to give players an early taste of our game, it also provided us with invaluable feedback to help us refine and polish ‘Gears of War 3’ to ensure it’s truly the culmination of the trilogy we promised to the fans.”
If you are a fan of stats you may be impressed to hear that 11 million multiplayer games where played by 1.29 million people in 145 different countries! The body count recorded was over 927 million, alarmingly 131 million of these were executions! The most impressive statistic was the number of bullets fired, 23 BILLION rounds of hot lead were fired in anger.
Did you take part in the Gears of War 3 Beta tests and has it persuaded you to pre-order the game?
