Mike Brown, the former creative director of Forza Horizon 5 and now CEO of independent studio Maverick Games, has offered a candid take on why Xbox Game Pass ultimately did not work out - defending the concept while acknowledging the hard reality behind its struggles.
Speaking on the MinnMax podcast, Brown said he sees the outcome as genuinely sad, describing Game Pass as "a well-meaning, player-focused concept" that simply never attracted enough paying subscribers at the prices Microsoft needed to charge.
"The concept was good"
Brown was careful to separate the idea from the execution. He argued that the core pitch - an affordable subscription offering a wide and diverse catalogue of games - was sound. The failure, in his view, was one of scale: the service never reached the critical mass of subscribers required to sustain the business model or justify the studio acquisitions that had been made in its name.
"The concept of Game Pass was good. It's a good idea. Like, let's have a subscription, make it affordable, try and get games to more people."
Brown acknowledged that the shortfall has direct human consequences, pointing to studios being shut down or spun off and workers losing their jobs as a direct downstream effect of the model not scaling as intended. He also pushed back against the tendency to single out individuals within Xbox as villains, saying those caught in the fallout were largely trying to deliver on a genuine vision.
The numbers backing his concern are stark. Xbox executives internally targeted 77 million Game Pass subscribers by the end of fiscal 2026; the service reportedly sits at around 30 million today, less than half that goal. Bloomberg has reported that Game Pass now has around four million fewer subscribers than when Microsoft last publicly discussed the service in 2024, suggesting growth stalled rather than accelerated.
The subscriber erosion was partly self-inflicted. Xbox increased the price of its highest Game Pass tiers in October 2025, a change that caused millions of people to cancel their subscriptions, with the service continuing to shrink for more than eight months. Microsoft later reduced the prices of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass in April 2026.
The Activision question
Brown also addressed the $70 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard directly, noting that the subscriber ceiling meant the deal could never make financial sense in retrospect. Bloomberg has framed Xbox's acquisitions of Activision Blizzard, ZeniMax Media, and several smaller studios as a collective roughly $80 billion bet on Game Pass that ultimately failed.
Brown is not alone
Brown is not the first industry voice to weigh in on Game Pass's structural problems. The source article notes that George Broussard, CEO of Moon Studios, had similarly argued the service had potential but criticised Microsoft for pushing out content without creating the kind of must-play cultural events that drive subscription growth.
Microsoft enacted 1,600 layoffs at the beginning of July 2026, with a further 1,600 expected to occur in the following 12 months, inclusive of the divestiture of several studios.
Brown's next move
Brown previously worked at Playground Games, serving as creative director of Forza Horizon 5 and as a designer on Forza Horizon 4. He is now developing a new racing game called Clutch at his independent studio Maverick Games. Clutch is set to release in spring 2027 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.
His comments carry weight precisely because of that vantage point - someone who built one of the flagship titles that sat inside Game Pass and watched the model from the inside. For players who picked up Forza Horizon 5 on the strength of a Game Pass subscription, Brown's interview is a rare, measured look at what that era cost the people who made it possible.
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