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."
"Was it hours played?" Willis wonders. "Was it games installed, was it user retention? I and many of my colleagues certainly never heard anything, like, metrics that we needed to hit. Is this a game you just want people playing in perpetuity? Do you want it to be super long? Do you just want people to see it and, like, want to install it right away, and you don't care if they play?"
This is why Doom: The Dark Ages had no business being on the platform. Willis says, "Doom should not have been on there. That was a stupid idea." While he was never explicitly told that its underwhelming commercial success contributed to id Software getting bludgeoned during Xbox layoffs, Willis wonders anyway if the game would have sold better had it not been available to Game Pass subscribers to play for free.
After The Dark Ages' 2025 launch, IP holder Bethesda was glad to tell fans, "Thank you for making DOOM: The Dark Ages the biggest launch in id's history - 7x faster to 3 million players than DOOM Eternal." But The Game Business reported at the time that a huge chunk of those 3 million players were on Xbox – over two million of them, actually – compared to just half a million fans on PS5.
"I know that sales didn't do as well as they were expected to," Willis says, "but I would suspect that's probably a huge part of Game Pass. And I guess whatever tradeoff from buying the game outright, to being on Game Pass, and whatever that metric was – installs, playtime, whatever – I guess maybe that wasn't good enough."
"I can only speculate why id was treated the way it was," the veteran producer adds. "I don't really have a good idea as to why id got chopped in half."
Unpopular and underperforming, Xbox doesn't have any answers, either.
