As crazy as it is to think, Game Pass has apparently been a massive success for the Xbox brand.As revealed by Microsoft itself last year,the service pulled in $2.9 billion in revenues just between August 2021 and March 2022. That’s an insane amount of money to be making from a service offering all Xbox’s first-party titles at no extra charge. It’d be tempting to say that Microsoft has something figured out with Game Pass, but that’s only if its users stick around.
What exactly are they going to stick around for, though? Xbox has precious few exclusives worth playing as it is, and now Redfall, the latest exclusive that was supposed to justify the subscription, has turned out to be yet another dud. If Game Pass doesn’t get a hit soon, all that revenue could quickly dry up. Unfortunately, that means the pressure is on for the Starfield team.
It’s been six years since the service began and it arguably has only five decent, AAA-quality games to its name:Forza Horizon 5,Gears 5, Halo: The Master Chief Collection,Hi-Fi RushandSea of Thieves.That might seem like an okay number, but Halo: MCC and Sea of Thieves both suffered horrible launches in the rush to get them out the door, and the Halo games in the MCC aren’t exactly new either. Forza Horizon 5 is a good racing game, but simulation racing is kind of a niche genre. That just leavesGears 5and Hi-Fi Rush for the average Game Pass user.
These exclusives were supposed to be joined by the likes ofHalo Infinite,Redfall, Starfield and other titles later on, but so far two of those three haven’t just been bad, they’ve been utter disasters. Halo Infinite might just be as infamous now as Cyberpunk 2077 when it comes to disappointing launches. At launch it was content bare, explicitly structured to farm microtransactions, missing staple series features and wracked with bugs bad enough to shut-down entire modes of play for extended periods of time. It was bad enough that most players either just went back toHalo: MCCor just stopped playing Halo entirely. Even now, a year and some months after launch, little progress has been made and343i itself is in turmoil.
Users then waited patiently for Redfall, thinking that Arkane surely would be able to deliver something fun and worthwhile. It seems that it wasn’t to be though;Redfall’s launchhas been an even bigger mess than Halo: Infinite’s. As disappointed Arkane fans have both seen and played, the game is riddled with technical problems. Worse, the game underneath all the issues seems to be as basic as it gets as far as co-op adventure-shooters go. There might have been a greater vision for it, but whatever it was is lost now. That just leaves Starfield, a game that was already pushed back several times already.
Now the fact that Starfield has been repeatedly delayed isn’t the problem. Developers should, as much as possible, take however much time is necessary to finish their games and make them as polished as possible. No, the issue is that Game Pass needs it to be a hit, and so Microsoft likely isn’t going to tolerate another delay now that Redfall has failed.
This means that pressure is now on for both Bethesda Softworks and Xbox as a whole. It’s likely that many users are hanging on now in the hopes that Starfield will be worth it, and if it isn’t, then Game Pass is in for a world of hurt. It won’t matter if there are “other games” coming later; a Starfield failure would likely tips the Game Pass service over the cliff. Considering Bethesda Softworks’ track record over the past decade, it’s a terrible position to be in.
Now, it’s too early to tell if Starfield will or won’t be the game to save Game Pass. Too little has been seen of it to say either way. Even so, Xbox never should have allowed things to get to this point to begin with. Years and years of rushing games out the door just to have them available has gone terribly for the brand, and those actions very well might finally catch up with it if Starfield isn’t the mega-hit everyone’s hoping it’ll be. It’d be a shame to see Game Pass fail since its library is a great deal for users, but this Redfall fiasco has things looking grim.
