Gears Tactics developer says Xbox Game Pass 'frees up' metrics for success, allows teams to take risks

Sid in Gears Tactics (Image credit: Xbox Game Studios)

What you need to know

The Coalition held an interview with VentureBeat recently.
In the interview, Operations Director Mike Crump explained that Xbox Game Pass allows the teams to take risks and not rely on "metrics for success."
Gears Tactics is set to release on April 28 for PC.
It's coming to Xbox sometime later in 2020.

Gears Tactics is coming soon and ahead of its release, The Coalition talked with Jeff Grubb at VentureBeat about how Xbox Game Pass changes the business model for different teams at Xbox. Mike Crump, Operations Director at The Coalition, had this to say.

We have certain expectations, and we will measure against those in terms of unit sales. But Game Pass just frees us up a little bit from having to be solely reliant on those kinds of metrics for success... But when we're deciding whether to make a game or not. It's nice to have all those different metrics for success and not be tied to just one measure of 'Did you sell a certain number of units at a certain price point or not?' because I think it really allows us to take risks and try things that we wouldn't otherwise.

Xbox marketing general manager Ben Decker also talked about how Microsoft views Game Pass like going to a movie theater, where smaller art house projects and big blockbusters are both shown. You can check out the full interview at VentureBeat.

Gears Tactics is set to release on April 28 for Xbox Game Pass for PC (Beta) and Steam. It's coming to Xbox sometime later this year. For another look at the game, you can check out the launch trailer here.

All the classes in Gears Tactics, and everything we know so far about levels, gear, loot, and skills

Tactical action

Gears Tactics

Survive the Locust

Gears Tactics brings tactical, turn-based combat and marries it to classic, frenetic Gears action. Outfit your squad and take down a Locust leader creating monstrosities.

Samuel Tolbert

Samuel Tolbert is a freelance writer covering gaming news, previews, reviews, interviews and different aspects of the gaming industry, specifically focusing on Xbox and PC gaming on Windows Central. You can find him on Twitter @SamuelTolbert.

2 Comments

"It's nice to have all those different metrics for success and not be tied to just one measure of 'Did you sell a certain number of units at a certain price point or not?'" Okay, so what are the other metrics of success? We can guess some of them (e.g. number of players), but what are the others?
Hours spent playing per player is going to be a big one. Even if a game is niche, if it drives value to Game Pass by keeping people invested in the service, it's worth more than someone who maybe plays more games but plays them for less over all. Someone playing State of Decay 2 for 100 hours per month is gona be worth more than someone who played like 50 games for 1 hour each, most likely. But even then, might be able to argue the person playing lots of different games might share content from those games a lot on social media, free viral marketing. Lots of interesting metrics you could pull out, good idea is to look at how Netflix decides what shows to renew, etc.