John Romero, co-founder of legendary first-person shooter developer id Software and designer on the original DOOM, is a big fan of Xbox Game Pass. That tidbit popped up during a recent interview where Romero spoke with Luke Lohr of Xbox Expansion Pass.
“It’s great because it’s try before you buy. You try something, install it, if you like it dive in and go buy the expansions, go get the rest of it,” he says. “It’s a really great way to just try stuff, one thing after another thing. Really the barrier for people to play games is just access to those games. Even free-to-play games, it’s like, knowing that those games exist, and Game Pass is like ‘Here they are!'”
“It’s really great to just have that visibility and discovery right there, and you can just try stuff. It’s like ‘Oh, I’ve heard about this thing, let me just install this and see what it’s like,'” he adds. “It doesn’t hurt the game companies that made those games, because they would’ve uninstalled it even if it took them longer to get it.”
During the interview, Romero touches on a number of other topics, including working on the original DOOM and Quake, his more recent endeavours, and more.
A stacked few months for Xbox Game Pass subscribers
Romero’s comments point to a continual problem that many game developers are facing right now, with evergreen “black hole” titles drawing away attention from the majority of other games. Increasingly, sheer discovery is the problem I hear brought up in my conversations with publishing staff and developers.
Tastes in genres and styles of games will obviously be a matter of opinion, but pound-for-pound, Romero’s thoughts also come at a time when the Xbox Game Pass lineup has never been stronger, even when just looking at games on the way from Microsoft’s internal teams.
The Xbox first-party machine is roaring, with games coming at regular intervals for the first half of 2025. That includes Obsidian Entertainment’s Avowed launching in February, as well as Compulsion Games’ South of Midnight, which is slated to arrive in April. Rounding things out is id Software’s DOOM: The Dark Ages, pummelling into a new demonic war in May.
Things are a hair less concrete for the second half of the year, but Microsoft’s publishing divisions have multiple large games slated to launch at some point across the summer and fall. Obsidian Entertainment is pulling a double-feature with the planned launch of The Outer Worlds 2, while Playground Games’ Fable is also pencilled in for 2025. Xbox Game Studios is also publishing Ninja Gaiden 4, a project that’s been six or seven years in the making.
There’s also those games are that are unannounced at the moment but extremely likely to appear, with a new Call of Duty title all-but-assured and percolating rumors of a remake for The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion.
