Phil Spencer has hailed the importance of the Game Pass.
Phil Spencer
The subscription-based service already boasts more than 10 million subscribers and the executive vice-president of Gaming at Microsoft believes it's given the company "a larger creative canvas to build on".
Spencer said: "We now have a platform that can really support us taking more creative risk.
"I think absolutely there's an opportunity for us to do that with more franchises, whether it's ... kind of spin-off genres, or even revisiting things like 'Flight Sim', and bringing those back.
"They're actually part of the same lens for us of, 'What is it in our portfolio that we have? And what ideas would we either like to go back and revisit or experiment with more?'
"Game Pass really helps us do that, because you can look at something like [Gears Tactics], and say, 'Hey, could we make a turn-based strategy game out of Gears. What does the success metric look like for that?'"
Spencer thinks the service has already proven to be a game-changer for Microsoft.
He told Polygon: "Your normal process [is] some business people would go off and use Excel and tell you what the average selling number is for a PC turn-based strategy game. You say, 'OK, and we want to bring that to console.' So you kind of add those two numbers up and you evaluate it.
"But now we can say, 'Well wait a minute, we have over 10 million subscribers in the subscription. How many of those people will play and get retained and be a part of the subscription?'"
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