The latest Xbox first-party release in Gears of War: E-Day has now been out for Premium Upgrade, Premium Edition and Collector's Edition owners for around 24 hours, and it seems to be off to a strong start already.

As spotted by HazzadorGamin, Gears of War: E-Day has already smashed the concurrent players record for Gears games on Steam, with E-Day peaking at 20,374 compared to Gears 5's all-time record of 10,196.

Beyond that, we've also spotted a lot of praise for the Xbox Series S version of the game. Digital Foundry published an article yesterday highlighting how Xbox and The Coalition worked to develop a new technique where the SSD is used "as a new tier of memory to supplement the 10GB of GDDR6 on Series S" - here are some direct quotes about it:

"In short, the game uses the SSD as a new tier of memory to supplement the 10GB of GDDR6 on Series S, with a bespoke system developed in collaboration with Xbox's platform team and Advanced Technology Group."

"The result is that Series S doesn't get a stripped-back version of the world. According to Rayner, the technique let the team avoid "really lowering the quality of the game". The Coalition believes it's one of the first to use the idea. Rayner said other game teams are already interested, which could make the technique a fascinating blueprint for future game development on Series S."

While performance isn't always perfect on Xbox Series S, Gears of War: E-Day seems to run well on the console for the most part, and we've seen a lot of praise being directed towards this version on social media today.

In particular, this following tweet has over 500,000 views and over 10,000 likes:

Good stuff, then! You already know that we've been having a blast with Gears of War: E-Day on Xbox Series X, but it's great to hear that both the PC and Xbox Series S versions are faring well with players along the way.

There's just a few days to go until the full release on October 6th, and it'll be interesting to see how many players end up checking out this GOTY contender when it launches for everyone. Here's hoping it ends up a massive success for Xbox!

Are you playing Gears: E-Day in early access? Enjoying it so far? Tell us in the comments.