Mike Brown worked on Forza at Playground Games for nine years before leaving in 2022 to form his own studio, Maverick Games, and work on his own open-world driving game, Clutch. As a developer who previously worked at one of Microsoft’s game studios, including serving as the creative director on Forza Horizon 5, Brown was recently asked for his take on the current “reset” at Xbox, which includes a new management team led by CEO Asha Sharma and 3,600 layoffs.
“My take on this Xbox thing is—from kind of peering over the fence like everybody else—I think it’s really sad and I think it’s really, really unfortunate,” Brown said, in response to the question posed during a new episode of the MinnMax podcast. “Because 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, all with a vision of getting regular games landing in this service for players.”
He continued:
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 that’s actually 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. And as much as people point fingers and call different people within Xbox the villain of the piece, the concept of Game Pass was good. Like, it’s 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. And if more people had subscribed that makes enough money and it works and and all those studios go on and those games get made again and those teams will make other games. Unfortunately, it didn’t.
The latest shift in strategy at Xbox comes after Game Pass started losing subscribers last fall due to a major price hike to compensate for the cost of adding Call of Duty day-and-date to the service. Sharma brought the price back down and pulled the blockbuster shooter Microsoft had spent $70 billion to acquire out of the service’s day-one commitment. The company is now slicing off studios and cutting developers left and right as it refocuses on its biggest franchises, including Halo, Fallout, The Elder Scrolls, and Minecraft.
It’s a repudiation of an almost decade-long effort inside Xbox to build up Game Pass, which at one point was aiming for over 100 million subscribers. But Brown pushed back against blame being laid at the feet of people like Sarah Bond, the former president of Xbox who was previously expected to succeed Phil Spencer when he retired instead of Sharma.
“These people on Twitter that are going after Sarah, they don’t know her,” Brown said. “They don’t know what she does. They don’t know what she does on a day-to-day. They don’t see how she operates in that business. And she is still there. I think she’s still an adviser on Asha’s team. But I’ll say again, I really, really liked Sarah Bond. Every time she spoke, she was so sharp, intelligent, impressive. It’s one of those people where you could almost just lean back a bit when they speak because you almost feel a little bit comforted by how competent they are.”