Former Forza Director on XBOX Game Pass: ‘It’s Just a Real Shame’

Everyone has voiced their opinion about the state of XBOX Game Pass over the last few months. The price has flown up, been yanked back down, and the value of the service has ebbed and flowed with games making their way onto the platform, only to be rescinded following operational adjustments. It remains one of the biggest points of contention in the gaming space.

Recently, a former Forza Horizon director and ex-Playground Games employee, Mike Brown, spoke about the unfortunate failure of XBOX Game Pass, a service that hosts the games he once created. He now has his own studio, Maverick Games, and is hard at work developing Clutch, an open-world racing game.

He was fairly critical of the service, but still tried to show the value in the concept.

Maverick Games Founder Criticizes XBOX Game Pass

It was a few weeks back that Mike Brown and everyone else at Maverick Games unveiled Clutch, an all-new open-world racing game that wants to go toe-to-toe with the likes of Forza Horizon. Coincidentally, that’s exactly where Brown hails from, having spent almost a decade at Playground Games, firmly under the XBOX banner.

Now, in a fresh interview on the MinnMax Podcast, Brown has answered an all-important question about XBOX Game Pass, giving his two cents on the debacle.

I think it’s really sad and I think it’s really unfortunate. They’ve honestly invested a fortune in the concept of Game Pass, 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.

I think the reality is not enough people have subscribed to it at the prices that they needed to pay in order to make that business viable, and now that’s 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 quite landing. And I think that’s just, it’s just a real shame. 

(Thanks to Kotaku for the spot)

This is based on fact. We’ve already seen four studios depart from under the XBOX umbrella in recent weeks, and we know that projects have been cancelled and studios have been shuttered in the last few years as XBOX’s leadership team wrestled with the Game Pass-centric operating model and tried to keep it all afloat.

Brown thinks it ultimately failed:

It was a good idea. 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.

If more people had subscribed that makes enough money and it works and all those studios go on and those games get made again and those teams will make other games. Unfortunately, it didn’t.

XBOX Game Pass might be bleeding subscribers, and the value is being pulled out further as games like Call of Duty are dragged back from the day-one slate.

Are you an XBOX Game Pass subscriber? Let us know what you think about the service on the Insider Gaming Discord server.

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