Forza Horizon 5 creative director Mike Brown, who's currently working on open-world racer Clutch after departing Microsoft-owned Playground Games in 2023, has offered his perspective on Xbox's current layoff-heavy pivot in direction. Despite the Xbox Game Pass push of former Xbox boss Phil Spencer and co being blamed by new boss Asha Sharma as she's ditched studios and given devs their walking papers, Brown still believes Game Pass was a "good" concept, if clearly not one successful enough to avoid this outcome.

My perspective on it from kind of peering over the fence like everybody else, I think it's really sad and I think it's really, really unfortunate," Brown said in an interview with MinnMax. "They've honestly invested a fortune in the concept of Game Pass as a service, which led to loads of teams being acquired, loads of games being funded, loads of people getting jobs, all with a vision of getting regular games landing in this service for players. 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.

"We're now going to see studios getting shut down or spun off," he continued. "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. I think that's just a real shame and as much as people point fingers and call different people within Xbox the villain of the piece, the concept of Game Pass was good. Like, it's a good idea. Let's have a subscription, make it affordable, try and get games to more people. We'll have a really diverse selection of games on there. We'll get a load of studios involved. We'll make some games that probably couldn't exist otherwise. And if more people had subscribed, that makes enough money and it works and all of those all those studios go on and those games get made again and those teams will make other games. Unfortunately, it didn’t."

Notably, Brown had positive things to say about his experience working under both Spencer and former Xbox president Sarah Bond, both of whom have had the Game Pass push's failure parked at their doorsteps as part of Xbox's shift in strategy. The developer called Spencer a "great leader" and Bond "one of those people where you almost just lean back a bit when they speak because you almost feel a little bit comforted by how competent they are". He also added that Bond specifically endures "a really rough ride on social media", from people who "don't know what she does on a day-to-day [basis]".

Whatever Spencer and Bond's relationships were like with those under them, it's difficult to empathise much when the duo were allowed to exit Xbox in what was at least portrayed as fairly graceful and comfortable fashion just before mass job cuts tied to the strategy they'd made themselves the faces of were made. Regardless of intention, if your ideas - or at least ideas you're responsible for implementing - don't succeed by the metrics assigned to them and thousands of people less well-off than you lose their livelihoods as a result, the least you can expect to do is take as much flak as the new regime making those cuts.