Former Forza Horizon 5 Creative Director Calls Game Pass a Good Idea That Did Not Work, and Studios Will Pay the Price

Mike Brown, the former Forza Horizon 5 creative director who left Playground Games to start Maverick Games in 2022, used a long MinnMax interview recorded this week to say out loud what most Xbox veterans have been mumbling for a year. Xbox Game Pass was a good idea. It just did not work, and the studio closures coming out of Redmond this summer are the bill for that failure.

Brown talked to the MinnMax crew about the current reset at Xbox under new CEO Asha Sharma, the 3,600 layoffs already announced, and the studios Microsoft has either sold off or pushed back to independence. He is not on the inside anymore, but he was at Playground for nine years and ran Forza Horizon 5 from announcement to launch, so his read is more grounded than most. His take is bleak in a specific, structural way: not angry, not betrayed, just sad that a player-focused idea could not find enough subscribers to keep the lights on at the studios that were bought to feed it.

What Brown actually said

The full MinnMax interview dropped on YouTube roughly four hours before this story was filed. Brown told hosts Ben Hanson and Kyle Bosman that he watched the recent Xbox reset from over the fence, and what he saw was the visible end of a nine-year bet. Microsoft had bought studios, funded games, and hired hundreds of people, he said, on the bet that a regular cadence of new games landing on Game Pass would pull in the subscriber count the math required. The math did not work, and the people attached to that bet are losing their jobs as a result.

Brown's exact words, as quoted by GameSpot and Kotaku: 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. He called the concept of Game Pass a good idea, then immediately added the qualifier: Unfortunately, it didn't.

The subscriber math, again, on the record

Brown did not invent a number, he was just repeating what Microsoft has effectively admitted. The target was 77 million Game Pass subscribers by now. The actual number is closer to 30 million. That is a 47 million gap against an internal forecast, and the gap is the entire reason Microsoft spent more than 80 billion dollars buying ZeniMax, Activision Blizzard, and a long list of mid-tier studios in the first place. If 30 million had been the actual ceiling, most of those acquisitions were a mistake, and the company is now correcting for that with the only tool it has, which is layoffs and divestitures.

Sharma has already cut the Game Pass price back down after last fall's price hike triggered a subscriber loss, and pulled new Call of Duty games out of day one as a direct cost control measure. Modern Warfare 4 will not land on Game Pass at launch this year. If you want to play it on Xbox or PC, you buy it. The studio resets that started with the 3,200 layoff announcement, the sale of Ninja Theory and Undead Labs, and the independence pivot for Double Fine and Compulsion all sit underneath that same spreadsheet. Brown was not throwing rocks at anyone, he was describing the math and the human cost of getting the math wrong.

The other thing he said: lay off Sarah Bond

In a section Kotaku highlighted, Brown also pushed back on the wave of social media attacks directed at Sarah Bond, the former Xbox president who was widely expected to inherit the role before Sharma's appointment. These people on Twitter that are going after Sarah, they don't know her, he told MinnMax. They don't know what she does. They don't know what she does on a day-to-day. Brown was explicit that he is not there anymore and cannot speak to her current advisory role, but he said her public appearances always read as sharp, intelligent, and impressive, and that blaming her personally for the Game Pass outcome is a category error. The failure is structural, not the fault of one executive or one president.

What other Xbox people have been saying, on and off the record

Brown is the highest-profile external voice to attach his name to the Game Pass verdict, but he is not the only one. Jason Schreier said on the Triple Click podcast earlier this year that there are a lot of people out there in studio leadership within Xbox who absolutely detest Game Pass, and that the prevailing internal view is that Game Pass has destroyed the value of their games. A former Xbox studio lead told Windows Central that launching into Game Pass almost creates an assumption that these titles could not sell on their own, and that it felt like a race to zero. Brown's public quote is the cleanest summary of that sentiment, and it is now attached to a name people actually know from Forza Horizon 5.

What this means for players

Game Pass is not going to disappear. It is too big a brand and too structurally important to the Xbox hardware pitch to kill. What is going to change is the windowing. Microsoft has already started treating Game Pass as a delayed catalog rather than a day-one subscription, with new Call of Duty titles landing in the service a full year after launch and big first-party games following the same path. Forza Horizon 6, which is in the official Xbox Game Pass day-one lineup right now, is a useful test case. If it ships and works, the day-one Game Pass promise is still real for the franchises Microsoft is willing to bet on. If more studios are sold off or closed between now and the next big exclusive, the catalog is going to thin out faster than Microsoft is willing to admit publicly.

The CriticalPixel take

Mike Brown saying Game Pass was a good idea that did not work out loud is the closest thing the Xbox alumni network has produced to a closing argument. The idea was player-friendly. The execution was not, and the price for that gap is being paid by the developers who built for the platform, not by the executives who made the bet. If you play on Xbox and your library has felt thinner every quarter for the last year, that is why, and now a guy who shipped one of the best-rated racing games of the generation has confirmed it on a podcast.