Gears Tactics is far from your typical Gears of War game. It represents a completely new direction for the series, adopting the XCOM-style turn-based tactics approach instead of the usual over-the-shoulder cover-based shooting it generally goes for. It is clearly an experiment that’s worked out well for the series, given how good the game is, but it might not have eve existed if it weren’t for Xbox Game Pass.
Speaking with GamesBeat, The Coalition operations director Mike Crump said that the fact that Game Pass opens up nearly every game in its catalog to larger audiences so that they no longer have to be bound by metrics of unit sales to judge how successful they’ve been meant that the developers felt confident in taking risks and developing something completely unlike anything they’d worked on in the past.
“We have certain expectations, and we will measure against those in terms of unit sales,” said Crump. “But Game Pass just frees us up a little bit from having to be solely reliant on those kinds of metrics for success. … But when we’re deciding whether to make a game or not. It’s nice to have all those different metrics for success and not be tied to just one measure of ‘did you sell a certain number of units at a certain price point or not’ because I think it really allows us to take risks and try things that we wouldn’t otherwise.”
Gears Tactics is out tomorrow for PC, while an Xbox One version is also in development. You can read our review of the game through here.