Forza Horizon 5 Director Says Game Pass Was a Good Idea That Simply Didn't Work

Forza Horizon 5 creative director Mike Brown has gone on record saying Xbox Game Pass was a well-intentioned concept that ultimately failed to deliver as a business — and that failure is now costing real people their jobs. Speaking to MinnMax, Brown said the service just couldn't attract enough subscribers to be viable, and that's a core reason Xbox is in the painful position it's in today.

Microsoft had internally projected 77 million Game Pass subscribers by this point, but the actual number sits around 30 million. Brown called that gap "really sad," pointing directly to studio closures and layoffs as the downstream consequence. "That is honestly just a result of a well-meaning player-focused concept of Xbox Game Pass not quite landing," he said. He acknowledged the idea itself was sound — more subscribers would have generated enough revenue to keep studios open and games in production — but added bluntly, "Unfortunately, it didn't." Microsoft poured a fortune into the strategy through acquisitions and funding, building toward a steady content pipeline that would keep subscribers engaged and growing. Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has since confirmed that Game Pass was a bet that didn't pay off, with Microsoft spending over $80 billion buying studios to feed the service.

Brown isn't alone in that assessment. Reporter Jason Schreier said on the Triple Click podcast that studio leadership inside Xbox "absolutely detest Game Pass," arguing it destroyed the perceived value of their games. A former Xbox studio lead told Windows Central that day-one Game Pass launches "almost creates an assumption that these titles could not sell on their own — it felt like a race to zero." That internal friction, it turns out, was present for years, with some executives reportedly warning early on that the model could cannibalize full-price game sales — a concern Microsoft itself eventually acknowledged.

Sharma has already started pulling levers: Game Pass pricing has been cut, and new Call of Duty titles will no longer land in the service at launch — the next entry won't arrive in the catalog until the following holiday season. A broader "windowing" approach is being discussed, where major releases stay out of Game Pass for an initial period to maximize full-price sales before entering the catalog. Nobody expects Microsoft to shut Game Pass down entirely, but the service that was once pitched as the future of Xbox is clearly heading into a significant restructuring.