"The concept of [Xbox] Game Pass was good" despite its eventual faceplant now contributing to mass job losses, reckons Forza Horizon 5 director

Forza Horizon 5 creative director Mike Brown, who left Playground Games in 2023 to work on the open-world racer Clutch, is defending the vision behind Xbox Game Pass even as the subscription service’s failures trigger mass layoffs and studio closures.

Brown told MinnMax that Game Pass was a “good” concept that simply didn’t attract enough subscribers at the right price point to sustain itself. “They’ve honestly invested a fortune in the concept of Game Pass as a service, which led to loads of teams being acquired, loads of games being funded, loads of people getting jobs,” he said. “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.”

The Human Cost of a Good Idea

Brown’s comments arrive as Xbox’s new boss Asha Sharma has shuttered studios and issued layoffs—a sharp reversal from the acquisition-heavy, Game Pass-first strategy championed by former Xbox head Phil Spencer and president Sarah Bond. Since our analysis of Xbox’s shifting strategy earlier this year, the company has closed Tango Gameworks and Arkane Austin, among others.

Brown acknowledged the devastation: “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.” He added, “The concept of Game Pass was good. It’s a good idea. Let’s have a subscription, make it affordable, try and get games to more people.”

“If more people had subscribed, that makes enough money and it works and all of those studios go on and those games get made again.”

Brown praised both Spencer and Bond personally, calling Spencer a “great leader” and Bond “one of those people where you almost just lean back a bit when they speak because you almost feel a little bit comforted by how competent they are.” He noted that Bond endures “a really rough ride on social media” from people who “don’t know what she does on a day-to-day basis.”

Why This Matters for Gamers

Game Pass’s structural weakness has direct consequences for what you can play—and from whom. The subscription model’s failure to achieve profitability means fewer risky, experimental games get funded. It also means fewer studios survive to make the next Forza Horizon or Hi-Fi Rush. As our deep dive on Game Pass economics showed, the math never quite added up.

The timing is brutal. Spencer and Bond exited Xbox in what was widely portrayed as a graceful departure, just before the mass job cuts tied to the strategy they’d championed. As one developer put it anonymously to our sources: “They left with golden parachutes while teams they built got dismantled.”

Brown’s perspective is notable because he’s an insider who benefited from Game Pass’s boom—Playground Games was acquired by Microsoft in 2018—and is now watching its bust from the outside. “It’s really sad and I think it’s really, really unfortunate,” he said.

The bigger picture: Game Pass isn’t dead, but it’s no longer the centerpiece of Xbox’s strategy. The company is now shipping first-party titles to PlayStation and Nintendo, as we reported last month, and has signaled a return to more traditional game-by-game sales. The subscription experiment, for all its ambition, couldn’t escape the math that haunts every streaming service: content costs scale faster than subscriber revenue.

What comes next for Xbox is unclear, but the industry’s appetite for another big-bet subscription model has soured. As Brown put it, the idea was good. The execution just didn’t make the numbers work.