It seems to me that no one is ever convinced that Game Pass deserves an oxygen tank while it's dying, not even Xbox executives. Having experienced what it's like to actually have your game on the sickly subscription service, Doom veteran Andrew Willis – who was impacted by the enormous job cuts at id Software in July – suggests a simple reason for all the confusion.
The former producer candidly tells Kiwi Talkz in a new interview that Game Pass is "poorly managed. Extremely poorly managed." He adds, "I think it was executed with so little foresight and so little attention to detail or understanding of the consumer market."
"So little sight there," Willis continues to say about Microsoft. "I think they just got caught in the trap of, 'Well, let's just make everything Netflix.'"
Microsoft could never decide how to measure Game Pass' success, Willis thinks. Xbox CEO Asha Sharma herself said in May that lowering the service's price to $23 was simply "a good first step" in improving it, and that Xbox staff would otherwise "have to outwork the problem in front of us in our path to restore durable growth." We know now that Microsoft's plan to "outwork the problem" includes a total of 3,200 layoffs at Xbox and, I guess, opportunistically deciding to publish another Hideo Kojima game.
Still, Sharma said as recently as July that "our business today is not healthy," partly because, "To grow, we bet on Game Pass, multi-platform, and a broader portfolio of content."
"While those businesses have created meaningful value," Sharma added at the time, "they did not grow at the pace we expected."
Willis could have predicted this. He says, "When you start making decisions about commercial art that are investor-driven rather than consumer, or even developer driven, you're eventually going to make some pretty big mistakes. And I don't think Microsoft was ever able to figure out exactly how to measure the success of Game Pass."
هەفتانە هەرسکردنەکان، چیرۆکەکانی ئەو کۆمەڵگایانەی کە خۆشت دەوێن و زۆر شتی تر
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.gamesradar.com/games/xbox-game-pass-is-extremely-poorly-managed-and-doom-should-never-have-been-part-of-it-says-former-producer
