Hero image: Gears of War: E-Day x Liquid Death promotional art. Image: Xbox Game Studios
I want to be clear about one thing before I start, because I don’t want this to read as a tantrum about marketing. I’m not angry that Gears of War: E-Day has a brand deal, and I’m not even angry that it’s with an energy drink. What gets under my skin is where the reward lands, because it lands inside a game you pay full price for, and the only door into it is a shopping trolley in another country.
Here’s the deal, as Xbox laid it out. From 25 September to 30 November, you buy Liquid Death Energy at one of five American retailers, connect your retailer account on the Liquid Death website, and you unlock a content pack for E-Day that is headlined by Chainsaw Flex, a Legendary animated pose you can put on any playable character, along with a banner, an emblem and an icon. The whole offer is U.S. only, so if you’re reading this in Australia you can’t have it at all, no matter how many cans you would be willing to drink.
I mean, think about what that actually means for the thing itself. Is a Legendary pose a piece of the game, or is it an advertisement wearing the game’s clothes? The answer changes how I feel about it, because I can scroll past an ad without a second thought, but this one gets equipped on your character in the game itself, right alongside everything you unlock by playing. You would look at a squadmate flexing with a chainsaw and never know whether they earned it or bought a drink.
I’ll admit the post announcing it is kind of funny. It says nothing says “I’m fine, everything’s fine” on Emergence Day quite like flexing with a chainsaw, and honestly, I laughed, because Gears has always known it is a little ridiculous and that is part of its charm. But a good joke in the press copy doesn’t change the fact that a cosmetic in a full-priced game has been handed to a drinks company to sell on its behalf.
And the region lock is what turns it from a bit cheeky into a bit insulting. Australian players will buy the same game, play the same campaign and the same Horde Siege, and then look at an item they were never even allowed to try for. Would you feel like a full customer, staring at that? I wouldn’t, and I think I would feel like I had walked into the right shop in the wrong country.
You might say it’s only a pose, and you’d be right, since nobody is losing a weapon or a mission here. But the small things are exactly where these habits get normalised, and I’d rather push back on a pose now than wait until it is something that matters. If the collab had been a limited-edition glass and nothing else, I would have shrugged and moved on, and there is a glass, by the way, which is on sale too. I just wish the rest of it had stayed on that side of the screen!
So no, I won’t be trying to import cans to get a chainsaw flex. When E-Day arrives, I’ll play it the normal way, earn what I can by actually playing, and try very hard not to think about that one pose I was never allowed to unlock.
Source: Xbox Wire – Gears of War: E-Day x Liquid Death, Steam – Gears of War: E-Day