Fans of Gears of War for the Xbox 360, rejoice! Microsoft has just announced that the Hidden Fronts map pack will be available for free from Monday onwards, making the words of Epic’s Mark Rein earlier this year good. Back then, he mentioned that Epic will be working hard to get content out for free eventually, but at this point in time, Epic is currently working in Microsoft’s store so they do need to make a little bit of dough on the side. For those who have bought this map pack for $10 since it was released in May, I hope that you won’t feel too bad because the developers did do a great job to release new maps, but if you’re late to the Gears of War party, this is nothing but great news. After all, nobody ever turns down anything free (unless it is a coffin or a bullet to the head, of course).

Microsoft did mention that the Hidden Fronts map pack has already been downloaded by more than 500,000 people, which means the company would have made a cool $5,000,000 in the process at the very minimum. This has pushed it to the coveted #1 spot in terms of premium downloadable content on the marketplace. I suppose after having their fill, Microsoft eventually decided that it has reaped this golden goose many times over and will make the map pack free globally – hooray for late adopters then.

More statistics for the phenomenon known as Gears of War – it has sold more than 4 million copies and holds the highest cumulative number of hours played by Xbox Live members. Will that record fall with the release of Halo 3? Only time will tell, and my money is on the latter.

Source: Joystiq

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