Epic Was Going to Let Gears of War Sit on the Shelf for a Decade Before Sale

If it wasn’t for Microsoft, we might’ve been without a new Gears of War game for the entirety of this new console generation. Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney recently spoke to Polygon about why Epic decided to sell the valuable Gears of War brand to Microsoft, and while the entire team has great admiration for the series, the original developers have just decided to head into a new direction.

"We've gone through a long process of figuring out the games we're going to build at Epic worldwide in the future and we concluded that we weren't going to be building any more Gears of War," Sweeney said. "As much as we love the game, we're heading in a new direction.

"The core Gears values are really tied to being big event-based, single-player console games with awesome cover mechanics and other things that really didn't translate into the future approach we were taking with online games, and competitive and cooperative multiplayer. Because we weren't planning on building any more Gears games we were just going to let that sit on the shelf for a decade or more, in case it had any future value to us."

Black Tusk is the team heading the next chainsaw-infused shooter, which will be exclusive to the Xbox One.