An Xbox Game Pass program, which Microsoft announced four years ago, has been officially canceled. Xbox Game Pass has been around since 2017, offering digital games to stream on Xbox consoles, Microsoft Windows, mobile devices, and other platforms. The library rotates fairly often, allowing players to enjoy a variety of games without having to commit to purchasing their own copies, and it’s been fairly popular. The service comes in three tiers, priced from $9.99 to $29.99, and a program that had plenty of gamers excited has officially been axed — another fatality of the Phil Spencer Era.
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On March 12, 2026, ID@Xbox global director Guy Richards revealed in an interview with The Game Business that Project Moorcroft was officially dead. The program was announced in June 2022 as a means to allow game developers to offer pre-release demos of their titles via Xbox Game Pass. This would enable them to build an audience while also collecting analytics to aid game development. When it was announced, the plan was to kick off Project Moorcroft in about a year, but as each year passed without any updates, it looked like it was on the chopping block. That fate is now confirmed.
Project Moorcroft Is No More
In his interview, Richards discussed the project and how the concept changed over time. He described Project Moorcroft as “A program where we were experimenting with some ideas for how we can support demos on Xbox.” He went on to explain that Microsoft approached the matter differently via game demo festivals, the ability to wishlist and receive notifications regarding a game’s development on the Xbox Store, and others, adding, “Demos is an area we’ve been focusing on, but in a slightly different direction to what Moorcroft was.” That statement pretty much settles it — Moorcroft is dead and buried.
There has been a lot of turmoil in Microsoft’s Xbox department of late, largely due to Phil Spencer’s retirement. He’d worked on the systems for years, running the direction the consoles took, and had planned on a next-generation Xbox before his retirement. When sales slumped on the Xbox Series X|S, the writing was on the wall, and Spencer left. It seems that a bunch of programs that he was involved in are following Spencer out the door, including Project Moorcroft. More shakeups involving Microsoft and its gaming hardware will likely continue for some time.
In the grand scheme of things, the death of Project Moorcroft isn’t a huge blow to gamers, though it’s likely that the ones who looked forward to its release are bummed. Still, it’s not as if Microsoft is making it more of a challenge to find and play demos, as it’s working to make them far easier to locate. The concept of Project Moorcroft likely fueled the company’s plan to get demos out of developers’ hands and into players’ systems, which will progress through the Xbox Store, at least for now.
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