Recently, Microsoft made some backend changes to how Xbox 360 era Call of Duty matchmaking worked, and the successful tweak brought thousands of players back in their droves. However, the move doesn't appear to have been exclusive to the Call of Duty series, as players are beginning to see improvements with another classic 360 era franchise.
The old Gears of War games have been a little hit-and-miss in recent years when it comes to online play. Overall they seemed easier to work with than much of the CoD library from the era, but it could be tough to find matches, especially on the original Gears of War. Now, users are beginning to report that more and more servers are starting to crop up when matchmaking online.
We can't 100% confirm the nature of the changes, but we can say that finding matches on Gears 1 does seem to have improved. In the last few years the 2006 title has appeared all-but dead online when searching for games, but we've just hopped on during a Monday morning (UK time) and have quite easily found a couple of 'Player Match' servers that are well-populated.
As this writer has regularly discussed in recent months, Gears of War 3 has still been a top choice for some online Gears mayhem here at Pure Xbox, and that title has seen its own improvements in recent weeks as well. General matchmaking has long been smoother with the 2011 title, as you'd expect, but the backend Gears 3 servers were improved recently to fix low XP rates and re-apply more recent balance patches that were incorrectly reverted.
As for Gears of War 2, we haven't had much experience with that one so we can't really speak for Epic's 2008 sequel, but fans are suggesting that all three games have improved. It may be well worth a 2023 revisit if you'd like to play any one of these classics on Xbox 360 - or of course on your modern Xbox consoles through backwards compatibility and with FPS Boost!