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Thomas Mahler, the CEO of developer Moon Studios and director of the two critically acclaimed “Ori” games, has spoken at length about the issues with Microsoft’s Game Pass strategy and the numerous ‘slop’ titles on the service.
Earlier this year, new Xbox boss Asha Sharma revealed that Microsoft had spent “over $20 billion on ongoing investments in our content, platform, and hardware subsidy” over the past five years. However, at the same time, their annual revenue has “declined nearly half a billion” and “going forward, this cannot continue”.
That has led to a report this past week via Bloomberg that three Microsoft-owned developers – Compulsion Games (“South of Midnight,” “We Happy Few”), Double Fine (“Psychonauts,” “Brutal Legend”), and Ninja Theory (“Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice,” “Enslaved: Odyssey to the West”) – are rumoured to be either closing or spun off. Arkane (“Dishonored”) is also said to be concerned about its future.
Mahler, writing on X, says that he believes Xbox’s Game Pass strategy hasn’t been more successful because Xbox did not produce enough hits to justify the subscription price, and that kind of service needs people to show up for it:
“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.
And that’s the crux of the issue: You’d need the Xbox folks 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 incentivised to produce massive hits, not just slop out mediocre content like a factory.
Gamepass, in some ways, is a little like Communism. And just like with communism, if you don’t give people a strong incentive to roll up their sleeves and go the extra mile, they won’t.
And if you then don’t get the quality you need, it all comes crashing down cause players will not pay up unless you basically force them to by making content that’s so good that they feel like they miss out if they don’t check it out.”
In February 2024, the Game Pass service had 34 million subscribers, but growth has slowed in recent years, and Xbox confirmed a price rise last year saw ‘millions of subscribers’ dropping away in the span of a few months before a recent price cut saw memberships start to increase again.
Source: VGC
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