Looks like they’ve cancelled the Perfect Dark reboot as well.
Comment posted by Arkane Studios founder Raphael Colantonio:
I think Gamepass is an unsustainable model that has been increasingly damaging the industry for a decade, subsidized by MS’s “infinite money”, but at some point reality has to hit. I don’t think GP can co-exist with other models, they’ll either kill everyone else, or give up.
— Raphael Colantonio (@rafcolantonio) July 5, 2025
Aftermath picks up from Colantonio’s Tweet above in the following article.
“I think Game Pass is an unsustainable model that has been increasingly damaging the industry for a decade, subsidized by [Microsoft’s] ‘infinite money,’ but at some point reality has to hit,” he wrote on Twitter. “I don’t think GP can co-exist with other models; they’ll either kill everyone else or give up.”
Microsoft has proven hesitant to publicly admitwhat common sense would infer to be true: Games included in a relatively cheap – though increasingly expensive – subscription package sell less. Microsoft, meanwhile, insists that Game Pass is at least profitable on its own terms, but Colantonio believes otherwise.
“Game Pass is only [profitable] if you ignore the 100 billions that MS spent in acquiring content for GP such as Zenimax and Activision,” he wrote.
The Game Business’ Chris Dring added another layer to this dynamic: “I asked for clarification on the ‘Game Pass is profitable’ claim, and was told no first-party costs are included,” he wrote on Twitter. “What they don’t count is the lost revenue that Xbox’s first-party studios are seeing as a result of the service. I have to imagine if first-party studios received similar compensation [to third-party studios on Game Pass], that profitability might not be correct.”
So basically they are bullshitting everyone. Who’d have thought? I always felt GP was a scam, guess I was right.
It’s funny/ sad to see the evolution of opinion on Phil Spector from the saviour of MS/ games to the harbinger of its destruction.
Shame the article is behind a pay wall, would have liked to read the whole thing.
If you use the reader mode in your browser you can read the whole thing. While I advocate for Aftermath subscriptions, if you’re only reading one article it’s fair to use the reader function.
Ah, didn’t think of that. Thanks.