Xbox Game Pass faces fresh scrutiny: ex-Forza director says not enough players would pay

In July 2026, Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass came under the microscope again after Mike Brown, the former creative director of Forza Horizon 5, said the service had genuine player-friendly potential but never found enough people willing to pay a price that could hold up over time. That lined up with Microsoft’s own acknowledgment that Game Pass growth had fallen short of what the company expected.

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By July 2026, Game Pass was reportedly sitting at about 30 million subscribers. That’s down from 34 million in early 2024, and nowhere near Microsoft’s internal 2026 goal of 77 million, a miss that dents a strategy built around lifting Xbox hardware, cloud gaming, and the pull of day-one releases.

Price looks like a big part of the problem. Microsoft reportedly pushed Xbox Game Pass Ultimate up by 50% in October 2025, lost millions of subscribers, and then lowered the price again in April 2026. Later, Xbox CEO Asha Sharma said Game Pass “did not grow at the pace we expected” and had become “too expensive for players.”

Inside Microsoft’s Xbox business and outside it, critics have argued that day-one launches can strip away a game’s premium value and turn things into a “race to zero.” Even so, some indie developers still view Xbox Game Pass as a useful source of funding and visibility, despite opaque compensation and very little transparency around how those deals actually work.

Microsoft is already changing course with new pricing tiers, no day-one Call of Duty releases, studio divestments, and 3,200 planned job cuts through fiscal 2027. If you follow Xbox closely, keep an eye on this reset as it plays out across Xbox, PC, and cloud.