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Game Pass 'Didn't Work,' Says the Man Who Made Forza Horizon 5

A Forza Horizon 5 director puts the Xbox subscription in the past tense, Modern Warfare 4 opens its beta, and DC ships a fighting game that isn't Injustice 3.

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Playkora The Roundup title card: Game Pass 'Didn't Work,' Says the Man Who Made Forza Horizon 5

A day of people saying the quiet part into a microphone. A Forza director quietly filed Game Pass under "good idea," a Game of Thrones RTS quietly moved to next year, and DC quietly announced a fighting game with a name it did not sound out first.

A Forza Horizon 5 director says Game Pass, as a business, didn't work

Forza Horizon 5 creative director Mike Brown weighed in on the state of Xbox, and per GameSpot and Kotaku, his verdict was that the concept of Game Pass was good but it never pulled in enough subscribers to work as a business, and that this fed into the current mess.

The careful phrasing does a lot of lifting: good idea, shame about the execution, and the execution was the entire thing. This is the sort of postmortem you only hear once the patient is already on the table. Xbox has spent years telling everyone Game Pass was the future; it's a jolt to hear someone who ships its games talk about it in the past tense.

Modern Warfare 4 opens its beta from August 28

Activision has set the Modern Warfare 4 open beta for August 28 to September 1, with pre-order players getting in early, as Gematsu laid out and Push Square confirmed for PS5. "Open" beta, with a fast lane for anyone who's already paid.

Calling it a beta is generous when the release is presumably weeks behind it. Nobody is finding bugs; they're deciding whether to keep the pre-order. It's a demo that files its taxes under a different category.

The Call of Duty movie will be set in the Modern Warfare universe

Paramount's Call of Duty film, out summer 2028, is officially planted in the Modern Warfare timeline, according to VGC and GamesRadar+. So the beta and the movie share a marketing calendar, which is either synergy or a coincidence nobody at Activision will discourage you from believing.

Modern Warfare is the sensible pick, being the sub-brand with actual characters people can name. My guess is the hard part isn't the setting but explaining to a general audience why the last act is a corridor that respawns you.

DC's new fighting game is DCKO, and it is not Injustice 3

DC announced a fighting game on Monday, and as Polygon and Gematsu report, it is a free-to-play mobile title called DCKO — not the Injustice 3 that a lot of people were waiting for. Kotaku's headline is simply "That's…Not Injustice 3, DC."

The name is the story. Say DCKO out loud once and you'll understand why people are already pronouncing it "Dicko," and why a room full of adults presumably signed off on it anyway. Naming a mobile brawler after a knockout is fine right up until the moment somebody reads it.

Game of Thrones: War for Westeros slips to early 2027

PlaySide's real-time strategy game set in Westeros, once due in 2026, has moved to "early 2027," with the studio citing its unwavering mission to hit a high level of quality, per GameSpot and Rock Paper Shotgun.

"Unwavering" is a strong word to reach for while the date wavers. Still, a Game of Thrones project that takes extra time to stick the ending is at least reading the room. Early 2027 is the vaguest possible spot on the calendar without simply pointing at the sky.

EA Sports FC called the World Cup winner again

Spain beat Argentina 1-0 to take the World Cup, and EA Sports FC's simulation had already tipped Spain — the fifth correct call in a row, Eurogamer and VGC note.

Five straight is genuinely impressive, or it's a football sim that quietly understands football better than most pundits. The annual prediction is free marketing that keeps landing, which is more than the actual gameplay updates can always say.

Six stories, and the loudest sentence in all of them came from someone whose job is to make Xbox look good.

Sources

Compiled from 13 publicly published sources, all linked above. Drafted and fact-checked automatically against those sources; corrections welcome — see our editorial policy.