Xbox Game Pass Successes For Older Titles Could Lead To Reboots

Xbox Game Pass has allowed for more data for Microsoft to use when looking at reboots of older franchises, according to Head of Xbox Phil Spencer.

Speaking on the Kinda Funny Gamescast, Spencer said that the service, which offers backwards compatible titles from all generations of Xbox, allows the company to make more informed decisions about reboots, remasters, or sequels.

Read More: Xbox Game Pass (July 2021): All Confirmed and Removed Games

Xbox Game Pass Successes For Older Titles Could Lead To Reboots

On the podcast, Spencer specifically notes a pair of Arkane titles when asked if greenlighting projects is made easier by a game's Game Pass popularity.

“Absolutely it does… take Prey, which I think was an amazing game when it came out but a lot of people missed."

“Seeing more people playing something like Prey, or Dishonored or going back to Fable and [that] you can talk about those games, for us as we sit back as a creative organisation and watch what people are interested in, it gives us more data to think about things that we might pick up and take forward with new ideas and new teams that might want to go do that."

“So yeah, Game Pass has definitely been a great source… It was amazing when Bethesda came in and we were able to put so many of the ‘old new’ games into Game Pass and going back with the legacy that we have with some of the IP… even thinking about Rare Replay was a really interesting thing for us to go do and letting people go and experience some of the old Rare IP.”

“We’ll stay on that, because Game Pass gives us a business model where that makes sense. It doesn’t have to be a [game as a service] version of a game, it can just be ‘this game sits there’ and people enjoy it on the service.”

In an interview with The Guardian, Spencer also claims that Xbox is creating more narrative-driven games.

For more on Xbox, we recently updated our list of the best Game Pass games.