Former creative director on Forza Horizon 5 and current CEO and creative director of Clutch developer Maverick Games, Mike Brown, has described Xbox’s Game Pass service as an idea that was good in concept, but ultimately didn’t work out. In an interview on the MinnMax podcast, Brown acknowledged that the subscription service was a great way to offer a wide variety of games to players while still staying affordable.
However, the inability of the service to reach a critical mass of subscribers that was needed to sustain it is what ultimately led to it not working out. Due to this, the service also couldn’t be used to fund more projects.
“I think it’s really sad, and I think it’s really unfortunate,” said Brown, “because they’ve honestly invested a fortune in the concept of Game Pass as a service, which led to loads of teams being acquired, loads of games being funded, loads of people getting jobs, all with a vision of getting regular games landing in this service for players. And I think the reality is not enough people have subscribed to it at the prices they needed to pay in order to make that business viable.”
“And that’s actually just really sad because we’re now going to see studios getting shut down or spun off. Loads of people are going to lose their jobs. And that is honestly just a result of a well-meaning, player-focused concept of Xbox Game Pass not working out. And that’s just a real shame.”
Brown also defended some of the Xbox employees that have been catching criticism from people, especially in light of the recent layoffs across the division.
“As much as people point fingers and call different people within Xbox the villain of the piece, the concept of Game Pass was good. It’s a good idea. Like, let’s have a subscription, make it affordable, try and get games to more people. We’ll have a really diverse selection of games on there. We’ll get a load of studios involved. We’ll make some games that probably couldn’t exist otherwise. And if more people had subscribed, that it makes enough money and it works and all of those studios go on, and those games get made again, and those teams will make other games. Unfortunately, it never reached the number that would make the $70 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard make financial sense.”
Brown is far from the first person to have spoken about the business behind the Game Pass subscription. Just last month, CEO of Moon Studios, George Broussard, had similarly noted that the subscription service had the potential to work out. However, his criticism largely revolved around Microsoft pushing out “mediocre content like a factory” on the service.
“You need those games your studios are producing to become smash hits, cultural events that everyone wants to play – but what was the big Xbox game in recent years that was just delightfully good? That game doesn’t exist,” he said, before going on to say that Microsoft needs to “deeply, fundamentally understand gamers and what they want”.
