Xbox Game Pass Could Have Been A Success, If Anything Went Right

The year is 2014. The underperformance of the Xbox One has completely deflated the once dominant brand, leaving many at the console giant demoralised. A change in leadership is necessary and Phil Spencer, a long-time company favourite, is elevated to lead. Spencer hatches a bold plan: gaming's answer to Netflix - a subscription service that allows people to play a catalogue of games for as long as they keep paying. Thus, Game Pass is born. Fast-forward a decade and, following successive waves of layoffs at Xbox-owned subsidiaries, it's difficult to call Game Pass anything but a colossal failure. The service failed to revive the Xbox brand, cost Microsoft billions in acquisitions and likely destroyed the sales potential of several high-profile releases. But was Game Pass really a bad idea or just poorly executed? The concept was sound: create a deal that was too good to pass up, a steady stream of high-quality games for an affordable fee every month. I, like many of you, did subscribe to Game Pass at one point to play a new game without paying full price to own it. There was undoubtedly once momentum behind the service, so why did it fail? The Attention Economy Compulsion Games Spencer and Xbox underestimated how fast the market was changing. The average gamer was interacting with the medium in new ways. Back before live-service games took off, the average player cycled through several games in any given year. These days, we're seeing more people find their 'forever games'. This is usually a popular competitive multiplayer game that one's friends also play, like Fortnite, Warzone, or League of Legends. It becomes a ritual they rarely deviate from. Players like this have little need for a subscription service, because they spend most of their gaming time playing one game, and sometimes the game in question is free-to-play and doesn’t require a purchase to enjoy for days, months, or even years. Second, the oversaturation of subscription services in recent years has soured people on the concept. It only takes a single month of paying for Netflix, Spotify, Game Pass, and Amazon Prime before people begin swearing off all of them. There's usually a limited amount of subscription 'slots' the consumer is willing to stomach, and services like Netflix and Spotify see more regular use than Game Pass in our day-to-day lives. It's part of the wider conversation surrounding the attention economy - Xbox isn't just competing with PlayStation and Nintendo, but also every other activity people do in their free time and, unfortunately, short-form content platforms like TikTok are winning that battle. The rise of alternative forms of entertainment to video games did Game Pass no favours as people have become less willing to expend mental energy learning a new video game, when they could just doomscroll instead. These factors certainly didn't help Xbox, and were largely out of the control of Spencer and his team. However, perhaps a larger factor than any specific change in consumer behaviour is that Xbox and its subsidiaries just didn't provide the games needed to sustain the service. Or at the very least the games people wanted to play. The acquisitions made by Xbox weren't bad on paper, but mismanagement and a dash of bad luck can quickly snowball into millions wasted. Xbox's Heavy-Hitters Failed To Turn Up For instance, acquiring the studio that made Skyrim and Fallout 3 is a no-brainer — The Elder Scrolls 6 as an exclusive release on the Xbox Series X/S would have sold systems; nobody could have predicted that Starfield, which took over a decade to develop, would be Bethesda's first dud since The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard (Fallout 76 notwithstanding). Likewise, Arkane Austin's Redfall was arguably the studio's first bad release ever, after over twenty years of critically acclaimed projects. In addition, 343 Industries (now Halo Studios) and The Coalition, studios created to be stewards of two of Xbox's biggest franchises, never quite captured the magic of their respective predecessors. Halo Studios had the potential to catapult the series to new heights but faltered every step of the way. An obsession with continuing to centre the narrative of successive games around Master Chief, long after his story should have ended, killed any excitement about where the story was heading. Infinite was envisioned as a forever game, but it launched unfinished and 343 was lethargic in adding the features needed to sustain a community that wasn't solely interested in competitive play. It's comical how almost nothing seemed to work out for Xbox over the last decade, except a couple of standout performers like Playground's Forza Horizon series. The pattern of mediocre releases became so consistent that you can't help but question the management at Xbox Game Studios. For the most part, Spencer seemed willing to let studios manage themselves. It's certainly a noble approach, but when a studio no longer needs to sustain itself and budgets and timelines become infinite, development cycles tend to elongate without necessarily improving the game. While some game directors understand the need for compromise - Obsidian's Josh Sawyer comes to mind - others fall prey to perfectionism, and become enveloped in never-ending cycles of iteration. We heard in the wake of Arkane Austin's closure that studio leadership was to blame for Redfall's directionless gameplay. It's situations like these where you wonder if Xbox being more hands-on may have salvaged the project. How much autonomy to give studios is a delicate balancing act, but there was likely a sweet spot between the autocratic leadership we're seeing now: studios being forced to make games in IPs they're not necessarily interested in, and the hands-off approach that resulted in these lacklustre releases, and Spencer never found it. There's a world where Starfield is the next big Bethesda hit, Arkane is making critically-acclaimed immersive sims at the cadence they released Dishonored and its sequels, and Halo is a massive sci-fi franchise with spin-off games, movies and so on. Unfortunately, that's not the timeline we live in. There Wasn't Enough Low-Budget Gems Also touted a lot within the industry during this time period was the concept of a 'Game Pass game', i.e. a project that people may not buy directly but would be happy to play on Game Pass. This is why Xbox acquired studios like Double Fine, Ninja Theory, Compulsion and so on. A 'Game Pass game' needs to be created by smaller teams in a shorter amount of time, or the project becomes as expensive as a regular, triple-A release but without the brand recognition needed to justify the price tag. Unfortunately, a lot of these projects also became difficult, multi-year development cycles (Hellblade 2, South of Midnight). This means, yes, they added to the Game Pass catalogue, but they weren't cheap enough to make them good investments. The only successful game created with this model that I can recall is Pentiment, which was created by less than a dozen people at Obsidian. In fact, Obsidian was probably the biggest success story of the Game Pass model, with Grounded being another game that's perfect for a subscription service while also proving critically and commercially successful. Unfortunately, these gems were too few and far between for Xbox. Gaming is a creative-driven industry which means you can't necessarily guarantee success. For Xbox, even near-guaranteed successes seemed to fall through the cracks. The acquisition of Activision-Blizzard and the subsequent release of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 on Game Pass was a 'last gambit' of sorts for the service. Though there were certainly people like me who were happy to subscribe to Game Pass to play a new Call of Duty, there were obviously far more people who would have bought the game at full price and were now getting a discount, losing Xbox guaranteed revenue. It was perhaps too little, too late. One could argue that Game Pass was never going to succeed in light of the consumer trends we spoke about earlier, but I'm not sure that's true. A lot of the Xbox-owned IPs are sleeping giants - Halo is still massive, even though it's been years since anything of quality was released. There's definitely a universe where every studio comes through for Xbox, and having a Game Pass subscription is as ubiquitous for gamers as Netflix is for every consumer, but we don't live in that universe, and now the industry is picking up the pieces. Number of Devices Concurrently Five, with Friends & Family (in limited countries) Number of Accounts 1 Primary Account Holder