Game Pass used to mean all first party games, day one, and now 2/3 tiers on console won’t have that. It’s a pretty shocking turnaround.

Surely this will turn things around for them 🙄

I think a lot of people will end up unsubscribing and then buying the games they miss.

Different voice actor too.

I’m surprised Aaron Greenberg didn’t fight for it, since according to him their last game smashed every metric and exceeded all expectations.

The whole piece is worth a read but to me this paragraph sums it all up:

“Who even knows what would please these people? They say they’re focusing their resources on bigger games, then they say they need smaller games. They say they love your games, then they shut your studio down. They make more money than they’ve ever made before, then they cut costs repeatedly, drastically, and cruelly. They buy more studios than they can manage, so the answer is not to use that aforementioned money to hire more (or perhaps better) managers, but to have fewer studios so management’s job can be easier.”

Me too. The writing is on the wall, especially if you’re at a small studio working on “small” games like Ninja Theory or Double Fine.

Give it a year. Thankfully Toys for Bob was able to buy themselves out, otherwise surely they would have either been shut down or put to work in the Call of Duty mines.

Shutting down entire studios should not be a part of normal cost saving.

No one’s asking you to trust them.

I heard they were basically forced into that situation after Bethesda canceled their Prey sequel (which looked great BTW.)

There have been rumors and speculation, but that’s not what MS is saying.

"More interestingly, [Xbox President Sarah] Bond teased a roadmap focused on next-generation hardware.

“'And what we’re focused on there is delivering the largest technical leap you will have ever seen in a hardware generation, which makes it better for players and better for creators and the visions they’re building,” Bond explained in the recent episode of the Official Xbox Podcast.'"

https://www.ign.com/articles/xbox-next-gen-console-confirmed-business-update

I hope everyone who plays Call of Duty next year on Game Pass takes a moment of silence for the ~2000 people that had to lose their jobs to make it possible.