While Game Pass might be a contentious subject depending on your own opinions, the CEO of Moon Studios – the studio behind the two Ori games and No Rest for the Wicked – doesn’t think too highly of the subscription service. Responding to a social media post by 3D Realms co-founder George Broussard, the CEO, Thomas Mahler, said that the service could have worked better if Microsoft didn’t “slop out mediocre content like a factory”.
In his lengthy post, Mahler said that the strategy would have worked “if people would’ve shown up for it.” However, “they didn’t, and the software catalogue was just nowhere near good enough to make people happily pay the subscription every month.” Comparing it to other subscription services, like video streaming, Mahler said that he would continue to pay for his HBO subscription to watch high-quality shows like The Wire and The Sopranos. Game Pass, he said, needs a similar level of quality.
“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.”
“Almost every single first-party studio in recent years has been floundering. You’d want Bethesda to create a ‘Skyrim in Space’ that ought to be better than Skyrim was, cause that was an old game: But we got Starfield instead.”
The “crux of the issue”, as Mahler puts it, revolves around the people working at Xbox to “deeply, fundamentally understand gamers and what they want. They’d need to understand what’s a good game and what’s a mediocre game. And they’d need to have good deals with devs so developers are actively incentivized to produce massive hits, not just slop out mediocre content like a factory.”
Broussard’s post also points out similar issues, noting that the company should not have given the greenlight to spend $100 million on the development of a game like South of Midnight. He wrote about how a large corporation like Microsoft needs to find the right balance between giving its game development teams the “freedom to make things, and execute”, and making sure that the projects still ultimately end up turning a profit.
“I’ve said it before, but I believe Xbox does not have the DNA to right the ship, so you will see a slash and burn phase where all the perceived fat and costs are cut,” he wrote. “Then what? Do we believe Xbox has the founding DNA that created the Xbox and the 360 (which all then left during another regime change, and we got the One and Kinect?). Can [CEO Asha Sharma], [CCO Matt Booty] and the rest turn things around? I hope so, but would be against.”
The discission largely revolves around the fact that Xbox is reportedly getting ready for sweeping layoffs and studio closures in the months following the end of Microsoft’s fiscal year on June 30th. Companies like Compulsion Games, Double Fine, and Ninja Theory have already begun negotiations to turn independent, according to a report.
