Game Pass Was A Good Idea But It Didn’t Work, Forza Horizon 5 Creative Director Says

Microsoft invested a “fortune” in making Game Pass work through its various acquisitions and funding efforts, Brown added. This was done with the vision of having a steady release of new games to help keep people subscribed and amass more members, but it didn’t come to be.

Xbox CEO Asha Sharma herself has acknowledged that Xbox Game Pass was a bet that did not pay off after Microsoft spent more than $80 billion buying studios to help funnel content to the service.

Internal strife

It has been reported for some time already that some inside Xbox did not buy into the vision for Xbox Game Pass and even tried to warn executives. Microsoft itself admitted that Xbox Game Pass could cannibalize full-game sales.

Recently, reporter Jason Schreier said on the Triple Click podcast, “There are a lot of people out there in studio leadership within Xbox who absolutely detest Game Pass.” He said these people think Game Pass has “destroyed the value of their games” and has been an overall detriment to gaming across the board “because of how it devalues games.”

A former Xbox studio lead, meanwhile, told Windows Central that launching games into Game Pass “almost creates an assumption that these titles could not sell on their own. It felt like a race to zero.”

So what happens next?

Microsoft admitting that Xbox Game Pass is a bet that did not work out suggests the company may have some changes afoot for the service. Already, Sharma has cut the price of Game Pass and announced that new Call of Duty games will no longer be included in the service at launch, so some big changes have already been enacted. No one is expecting Microsoft to completely kill off Game Pass, but instead there could be other changes, like the kind of “windowing” of new releases that Microsoft has talked about.

This would involve keeping key titles out of Game Pass at launch and for a period of time, similar to how movies are only available in theaters at first before coming to digital and streaming. The idea here would be to help maximize revenue with people paying full price before they are included in the catalog. New Call of Duty games, for example, now won’t come to Game Pass until the following holiday season. So if you want to play Modern Warfare 4 on Xbox or PC at launch this year, you have to buy it outright, as it won’t come to Game Pass until Holiday 2027 at the soonest.