Gears 5 was announced at E3 2018 along with another two Gears video games no one expected: Gears Pop and Gears Tactics. With these three announcements, Microsoft is hoping to turn the series into its next mega-franchise.

Gears of War is changing starting with Gears 5, which is planned for release in 2019. For the first time, the franchise is heading to other platforms with the new Gears Pop and Gears Tactics video games.

Rod Fergusson, head of The Coalition, explained these two huge changes, stating that this way, Gears of War will earn a bigger audience. Now someone who does not play on consoles will be able to play Gears on their mobile or PC.

“It’s about making the Gears of War franchise more approachable. As a creator, you’re like, ‘What are the things that are preventing people from gaining access to that world?’ One of the things that is pretty obvious is platform – it’s one of those things where there are gamers out there who might actually love Gears of War but they don’t play on console”.

This is what they were aiming at when they came up with Gears Tactics and Gears Pop. Fergusson said that they did not want to just port an existing game to other platforms; they wanted to create one specifically designed to be playable on other platforms. Calling Gears 5 the ‘Gears Prime’ game, he specifically said:

“It’s all lead by Gears 5 being ‘Gears Prime’, as we jokingly call it, as the console third-person shooter but we wanted to reach out to other platforms in a very authentic way, creating games that are focused on that platform – that aren’t ports of an existing game, but are actually games that are designed and created for it.”

Gears Tactics will be set 12 years before the first Gears of War and will be tailored to PC play while Gears Pop will be available for mobile devices and will be an authentically mobile-first genre for the mobile audience. Microsoft clearly is aiming to capture a bigger audience from this point on, starting with ‘Gears Prime,’ which means that in their future works, we might get to play the next Gears of War games on PC and not only on consoles.