The director of Xbox’s critically acclaimed Ori games has criticized Microsoft’s Game Pass strategy, claiming that the subscription service could’ve been a bigger success if the company didn’t incentivize studios to “slop out mediocre content like a factory”.
Game Pass has come under focus again this week, after news broke that Microsoft is allegedly planning significant cuts across its gaming business, including the potential closure of at least three studios – Double Fine, Compulsion, and Ninja Theory – purchased during Xbox’s big subscription push.
Game Pass’s last known subscriber figure was 34 million, published back in February 2024. However, growth is understood to have slowed in recent years, and Xbox recently confirmed that a price rise introduced last year shed “millions of subscribers” in a few months.
Moon Studios CEO, Thomas Mahler, who directed both Ori games, wrote on X that he believed Game Pass hasn’t been more successful because Xbox did not produce enough hits.
Mahler was responding to a post from 3D Realms founder George Broussard, in which he questioned whether Microsoft “overbought” studios in an attempt to feed its Game Pass ambitions.
“The Gamepass strategy could’ve worked if people would’ve shown up for it,” Mahler wrote. “Problem is: They didn’t and the software catalogue was just nowhere near good enough to make people happily pay the subscription every month.
“It’s the same as with streaming in the film business: I’ll happily pay my HBO sub cause HBO has amazing content that I want to watch. I’d keep that sub just to binge Sopranos, The Wire, GoT, etc.
“But with games, ‘NEW’ for some reason is very, very important to players. And if your new content doesn’t even remotely match the quality of the old content, you’ve got a problem.”
The Moon Studios CEO added that he believed Microsoft needed its studios to deliver more hits that a broad audience would want to play. “But what was the big Xbox game in recent years that was just delightfully good? That game doesn’t exist,” he wrote.
“Almost every single first-party studio in recent years has been floundering. You’d want Bethesda to create a ‘Skyrim in Space’ that ought to be better than Skyrim was cause that was an old game: But we got Starfield instead.
“And that’s the crux of the issue: You’d need the Xbox folks to deeply, fundamentally understand gamers and what they want. They’d need to understand what’s a good game and what’s a mediocre game. And they’d need to have good deals with devs so developers are actively incentivized to produce massive hits, not just slop out mediocre content like a factory.”
Mahler said that Game Pass had become “a little like Communism” because it had not given developers “a strong incentive to roll up their sleeves and go the extra mile”.
“And if you then don’t get the quality you need, it all comes crashing down cause players will not pay up unless you basically force them to by making content that’s so good that they feel like they miss out if they don’t check it out.”
According to Metacritic’s annual publisher rankings, Microsoft was the fifth-best publisher in 2025, in terms of aggregated review scores. In 2024, Bethesda ranked 8th. In 2023 and 2022, Microsoft didn’t make the top ten. However, in 2021 it grabbed a rare top place, thanks to Forza Horizon 5, Psychonauts 2, and Microsoft Flight Simulator.
