• Hey Guest. Check out your NeoGAF Wrapped 2025 results here!

Did Game Pass kill Doom: The Dark Ages?

kevboard said:
without gamepass, 1 million users would have played it
Click to expand...

It is like you deberately exclude Xbox and made it to look like it is a PS5/PC only game LOL

Gamepass is meaningless. These players haven't bought the game and their playtime is meaningless. Bravo for those who bought it
 
Hyper_hyper said:
It is like you deberately exclude Xbox and made it to look like it is a PS5/PC only game LOL

Gamepass is meaningless. These players haven't bought the game and their playtime is meaningless. Bravo for those who bought it
Click to expand...

even 3 million sold units would have meant it was a financial flop, but it wouldn't have sold 3 million without gamepass either.

a far better metric would be to see how many people got the achievement for reaching, say, the third mission, as that would be an indicator of who was actually interested in the game in the first place.
I bet it's not 2 million... I bet it's closer to 1 million.
 
Hyper_hyper said:
Imagine to apply your logic to every game then. :./ 3 million players played the game, 2 million Gamepass users said fuck off to buy the game.




I've said : "imagine is some of these 2 million players..." Million would be great, that's 2 million then at launch.
Click to expand...
Remember that Xbox fans buy very few games and PlayStation fans don't like Xbox enough to buy an Xbox console and go there to rent games on Gamepass and Steam fans don't like Microsoft Store and Xbox App.

You're greatly overestimating the number of lost sales here.

It's more likely that the game would've sold as little or even less since it wouldn't get the same reach if only those paying full price would play it and talk about it.
 
kevboard said:
even 3 million sold units would have meant it was a financial flop,
Click to expand...

You don't know the cost of the game. But if Dark ages has sold 3 million COPIES, it would is above that Eternal sold at launch. Eternal launch was successful.

kevboard said:
but it wouldn't have sold 3 million without gamepass either.
Click to expand...

Even 2 million copies sold would be far better


Fess said:
You're greatly overestimating the number of lost sales here.
Click to expand...
Nope, i'm not. Same happened with Gears 4. :/ Same will happen with Gears E Day.
 
I haven't really cared about Doom since the 90s, but the concept of Dark Ages seemed... not right for Doom.
 
I loved TDA, even more so that Eternal, and I 100% think day 1 Game Pass killed a lot of sales. Hell I'm part of the problem. I got Game Pass for 1 month played the Hell out of TDA. Got all the achievements and then uninstalled and cancelled Game Pass. The first Doom game that I never bought. I actually feel guilty about that. I'll buy TDA and the DLC on Steam, but the damage has been done to I.d.
How the hell they got gutted and 343 Studios are still cranking out shitty game after shitty game is beyond me.
 
Last edited:
kevboard said:
Gears 4 released before Gamepass, Gears 5 released after, and therefore in gamepass.
and I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that Gears 5 sold more copies
Click to expand...
Phil said Gears 5 sold better than 4 in one interview when he was talking about how Game Pass didn't kill sales and that the thing that matters the most was the number of players a game can reach. But also, this was before GP on PC was a thing so... who knows how things would have been if Doom wasn't on Game Pass

VoGYV8g36TEYZ0Ey.png
 
Snowdonhoffen said:
Phil said Gears 5 sold better than 4 in one interview when he was talking about how Game Pass didn't kill sales and that the thing that matters the most was the number of players a game can reach. But also, this was before GP on PC was a thing so... who knows how things would have been if Doom wasn't on Game Pass

VoGYV8g36TEYZ0Ey.png
Click to expand...

it was still in Gamepass on PC... it's a play anywhere game. all play anywhere games were playable on PC by gamepass users, as well as many games that were not play anywhere, but were on the MS Store on PC while being in gamepass.

gamepass PC simply became its own thing to give PC users a cheaper alternative as they'd need to pay for games they couldn't play if they got the normal gamepass subscription.
 
Last edited:
clarky said:
Every xbox studio killed themselves by releasing mid games that took forever to make.
Click to expand...
Ya if Xbox was making good games they wouldn't have been in a position to need to try something like gamepass. Xbox was an already failing brand. People just put all the blame on gamepass because they're still butthurt over Xbox fans throwing the perks of the service in their face.
 
Didn't this game cost 80 euros? Didn't game pass was like $30 dollar at the time? What killed this game was Xbox own death, not the other way around.
 
it was still on Gamepass on PC... it's a play anywhere game. all play anywhere games were playable on PC by gamepass users, as well as many games that were not play anywhere, but were on the MS Store on PC while being in gamepass.

gamepass PC simply became its own thing to give PC users a cheaper alternative as they'd need to pay for games they couldn't play if they got the normal gamepass subscription.
Click to expand...

Yep, Xbox Gamepass on PC and Gamepass Ultimate were introduced June 2019, while Gears 5 released September 2019.
 
Last edited:
People blame Gamepass without ever fully explaining how it is to blame.

Let's say Doom TDA budget was around $250 million. Expected sales being 3 million on Xbox, 3 million on PlayStation, 4 million on Steam. Very reasonable numbers for that franchise based on platform size.

So $700 million from 10 million sales.

Assuming every Xbox user played it via Gamepass, that's $200 million that would have come out of the Gamepass pot of money.

Where were the other 7 million sales then? It should have sold 3 million on PS, since no Gamepass there. What happened to the expected Steam sales?

Did the Steam "no steam no buy" users all play it on PC Gamepass?

So how did Gamepass kill the expected sales of the game on PS and Steam? It was Day 1 on both.
 
For me it was the 180Âş turn on gameplay design, from the high-octane action of DOOM Eternal to a slow crawl and Simon Says first-person parrying in Dark Ages. Fuck that.
 
It has 3x lower sales on steam then eternal. Honestly 80 euro price was probably the biggest killing blow to the game.
 
Donald mac Ronald said:
I also think eternal rubbed people up the wrong way. And lost interest because of it.

I know a guy who would masterbate over 2016 but hated eternal.
Click to expand...
Basically this, minus the masturbation bit. The constant need to add innovative gameplay mechanics. I already disliked the glory kill stuff in Doom 2016, but Eternal forced you even more into a damage rotation gamestyle and they piled even more stuff on top of it.
I expected and wanted a simple shooty romp, not resource management. It was quickly uninstalled.
 
LectureMaster said:
While The Dark Ages is a huge departure from Eternal's mechanics, I respect id Software's ambition to shift the fundamentals with each entry. And I love TDA it's no less than a 8/10 game.

It also boggles my mind so much why it flopped so badly compared to Eternal.

Yeah Game Pass and that 70 bucks are the culprits I can think. Same thing can be said for Indy game too, aint no way a full-fledged AAA Indiana Jones game would only have 12k peak CCU on Steam had the game not been put on Game Pass.

Tns3SSEJZw7jhMU0.png


Also Doom Eternal released at the very peak of COVID lockdown so probably the sales got boosted a lot by the lockdown.
Click to expand...
How many people are playing Indie or any other gamepass games on PC? Wasn't the stats for gamepass player overwhelmingly on xbox hardware?
That was the whole problem. MS heavily removed focus from xbox and put it on gamepass but overwhelmingly, users wanted to play gamepass on xbox hardware.

Pretty sure, IJ simply didn't sell that well on PC
 
I think a lot of things ended up hurting the new trilogy.
I played Doom II as a kid, back when people genuinely believed playing Doom would make you shoot up your classmates at school. Doom (2016) was so good that it made me replay the original games, and then replay them again with Project Brutality. I still go back and play them about once a year.
Doom Eternal was such a drastic change. I remember hating almost everything about it, even little things like weapons floating above the ground instead of Doomguy actually picking them up. I hated constantly running out of ammo, having to switch weapons every quarter of a second, and being forced to use the chainsaw all the time.
Then Dark Ages came along, and to me it looked even worse with its heavy focus on parrying.
 
For me... yes.
I buy 1 month of Game Pass PC maybe twice a year. I wait for at least 2 games I want to play to be available (and I have some free time).
Last time I had it I finished Indiana Jones & The Great Circle and Doom: The Dark Ages. Both were still $50+ titles at the time.

It's been said many times before: it's great value for the consumer, but an odd business move by Microsoft. Have they actually said if it's profitable.
I do sometimes wonder if many people keep their Game Pass subscriptions active month-after-month, and if so, why?
 
Gamepass is 100% one of the reasons.
It's a short games with a price tag of 69.99 so many people opted to play it on gamepass. Combine that with it being the third consecutive DOOM game from id and people didn't vibe that much with the changes it brought with it. It all combines to low sales. But gamepas definitely had a hand in it too.
 
Zacfoldor said:
I really believe this. Yes. Absolutely it did.

When you get a game for free somewhere, nobody on other platforms are going to pay for it.

When it is on gamepass we view it as nothing. That is why gamepass is BAD. This is not our fault, this is the nature of all humans. Phil should have known this.

It doesn't matter if it is only free on Xbox. If the game has ever touched gamepass, then many people will spite not buy it knowing someone got it for a dollar a year. Disbelieve this is you will but the market will play it out everytime. YOU CANNOT DEVALUE YOUR OWN PRODUCT AND EXPECT OTHERS TO VALUE IT.

Not convinced? Last try. People do not buy good deals. You will go out of business offering good deals. They buy what they perceive to be a good deal. The sizzle. When Xboxers get a game for free on gamepass and they talk about that online, it kills the sales on all platforms. Sorry guys.
Click to expand...
Weird, I wonder what all those Forza Horizon and Clair Obscur Sales on the other platforms were caused by then.
 
Last edited:
They took the series in a direction that was too niche. Doom Eternal was too hard for most gamers and too un-Doom like in its story and setting. Dark Ages doubled down on some of those aspects. They killed the momentum themselves - had it for Eternal and then lost it.
 
id Software killed Doom: The Dark Ages.

I know it's frustrating when obviously talented and technically skilled people get fired, but the fact of the matter is that even if it wasn't Asha acting as the headsman here, id would've been on the chopping block even as an independent studio. There is no charity in this industry - if your game bombs, you're out on the streets. Sorry.

Their last slam dunk was Doom 2016. That game owned. Since then however, they've made several questionable decisions. Many, many people detested the gameplay loop of Eternal. It was too sweaty and felt like it was designed for streamer try-hards. By putting the player on the backfoot more, it ruined the power trip feeling of 2016 which everybody loved. Put simply, if you release a divisive game, then of course a chunk of people are less likely to try the sequel. Throw in the Mick Gordon controversy which lead to his exit, his music being a HUGE part of the nu-series' appeal, and it's easy to see why many people didn't even bother.

Now, I feel the Dark Ages gameplay loop was a correction in the right direction, but it also adopted tropes that had been done to death by 2025. "Parry slop" was the moniker attached to it, and it's not hard to see why really. Unfortunately it feels like we've reached the expiration date for parry mechanics being interesting. id also leaned too heavily into cinematics and storytelling (just why?), and blew a lot of money on the Serrat and Atlan sections which were just no fun to play. You do not interrupt some of the greatest FPS gameplay out there for Lair 2.0.

Both Eternal and The Dark Ages were also like 5 hours longer than 2016, just too long for what they needed to be. All of this bloat adds months of development time, millions to the budget and dilutes the main draw of the game. The more id added, the more they made it harder for themselves to succeed.

By the way, the commentary on "Game Pass kills sales" misunderstands how Microsoft gauge success on the platform. They use Netflix-style metrics for that, so success will be gauged in terms of the number of players as a function of the game's allocated budget. Player engagement, while a meme on GAF, does actually matter a lot for a service, because it gauges popularity and therefore what is worth allocating more or less of the pool of subscriber money to. If everyone just played the Game Pass version instead of buying it, then the game would've been viewed as a roaring success. Fact is though, people didn't even bother showing up for that, which was particularly damning from Microsoft's perspective.
 
kevboard said:
well, it wasn't tho.
literally everyone you'll see on twitter or forums who likes the game, only likes it after changing the game speed and changing things like the parry timing and stuff like that.

the game feels completely out of tune. like a guitar with 2 broken strings and 3 loose ones.
Click to expand...
Im not defending the game im defending difficulty sliders. Whether there balancing was recieved well or not isnt proof of difficulty sliders being at fault. There are other games with them that havent been unbalanced. I personally didnt have an issue with its default settings even if others did.....so its not "everyone" even for that game.

One of the first games to have these sliders was Operation Flashpoint in 2001 and it worked really well on that game. Some people for instance dont mind bullet sponge enemies. I certaintly dontlike em and love adjusting the enemy health seperate from there ai and tactical intelligence. So i can fight enemies that ars smart but not bullet proof. People are different ....there isnt some special "game was made for this setting". Thats a narrative many tell themselves after they like something and better reflects a lack of imagination of other configurations that may also work.

Jfyi i dont like dark ages its a brown unreadable mess outside cutscenes.
 
Last edited:
CGNoire said:
Im not defending the game im defending difficulty sliders. Whether there balancing was recieved well or not isnt proof of difficulty sliders being at fault. There are other games with them that havent been unbalanced. I personally didnt have an issue with its default settings even if others did.....so its not everyone even for that game.

One of the first games to have these sliders was Operation Flashpoint in 2001 and it worked really well on that game. Some people for instance dont mind bullet sponge enemies. I certaintly dont and love adjusting the enemey health seperate from there ai and tactical intelligence. So i can fight enemies that ars smart but not bullet proof. People are different ....there isnt some special "game was made for this setting". Thats a narrative many tell themselves after they like something and better reflects a lack of imagination of other configurations that may also work.

Jfyi i dont like dark ages its a brown unreadable mess outside cutscenes.
Click to expand...

difficulty selections are usually a get out of jail free card for Devs that lack the backbone to present their design to the player.

adding sliders on top of that is just awful design for a single player action game 🤷.

the only exception I have for difficulty selections on first boot is when it is done in the style of GoldenEye/Perfect Dark/Time Splitters 2, which completely alter level objectives, enemy placements and in some cases even level layouts.

what is just imo bad game design, is if the difficulty selection is quite literally just value tweaks and maybe a handful of enemy class swaps. that's not only lazy, but puts the player into the scenario where he can literally make the game worse for himself without knowing.

you can't know which mode has the best overall balance. even if you start playing one mode and don't fully like it at first, you can't anticipate a difficult spike later on that completely changes the initial impression of that mode.


if there's only a single mode to chose from on the initial boot (unlockable modes are 100% fine and even good imo) that means the developers need to make sure that that specific mode better be fair, engaging, and well paced.
if there are 5 modes to chose from out of the gate, that's not the case. then there's almost always the issue that the majority of them are either too easy and trivialise the game's mechanics, or too frustrating and make the game's mechanics unusable.

extreme examples of this are games like Uncharted 4 and Splinter Cell Blacklist.
on anything below the 2 hardest modes or so, they are piss easy to the point where you don't have to engage with the mechanics in any meaningful way. on the ones above that the enemy AI, or in the case of Blacklist the fail state and restrictions, completely fuck up the game's mechanics and makes then nearly unusable, turning both games into hide behind wall simulators.


I have yet to play any game with a difficulty selection that is as well designed as Dark Souls 3, Bloodborne, Mario World, Breath of the Wild, Shovel Knight (+DLCs) or more recently Mina the Hollower.

that last one is interesting, because ahead of launch it sounded like they will make the same mistake as Doom TDA, but what they did was actually pretty brilliant.
they have 1 singular difficulty mode, and then a menu with tweaks that can completely alter the game, like in Doom... but using any of those settings in that menu will turn off your ability to unlock achievements, clearly signalling to the player "hey, these are cheats, and the game is not meant to be played this way".
basically, what they did is just give you a cheat menu without a code. while Doom gave you 6 modes and sliders that it directly encourages you to use.
 
Last edited:
Personally, I found the Ps5pro version was subpar until a month ago.

Just bad timing, but pro version is probably 25% of the ps5 market.
 
Last edited:
I 100 percent think it did. GamePass is cancer if they want day one AAA titles and the average cost of a AAA is hundreds of millions.
 
Back when they were struggling with Doom 4, Carmack got it back on track by pointing out that Doom is about demons and shotguns.

I can't tell wtf the new one is about.
IMO all that footage of slow enemy projectiles is a turn-off. It looks wrong, like an arcade game that tries really hard to be MATURE and A GAMEY-ASS GAME for US GROWN UP GAMERS who slam triple IPAs like 2016 hipsters in exposed brick wall studio apartments. It's as corny and dumb as a shitty ad in a 90s gaming magazine.
 
Lionel Richie said:
DOOM flew too close to the sun. Too many casuals bitched about Eternal enough because it wasn't 2016 part two, then TDA double down on it being more a character action game than FPS. It became niche. Also, they kind of miss Mick Gordon badly, that's my one complaint.
Click to expand...
I loved 2016 and hated Dark Ages. They completely changed the gameplay loop by overinvolving the shield as a block mechanic. I got bored and annoyed really quickly
 
I bought it to support the studio I've loved since I was a kid.

I don't think Game Pass killed it, but Eternal's feedback was initially super divisive. I wouldn't be surprised if people left and didn't come back to it. Probably kept up with previews and figured it was more of the same.

Those that were curious but not super invested likely went to Game Pass to check it out. Cause why not?

Loved 2016, enjoyed Eternal, enjoyed TDA. But I think TDA is the weakest of the three for me.
 
Last edited:
Hyper_hyper said:
Nope, i'm not. Same happened with Gears 4. :/ Same will happen with Gears E Day.
Click to expand...
Gears 4 wasn't released on Steam. And E-Day isn't releasing on PS5. You're mixing everything up here. Doom TDA was day 1 on Steam and PS5. Why would a Gamepass release kill sales on those gigantic platforms? Like I said PS5 gamers aren't playing on Xbox and Steam gamers aren't playing on Xbox App. If they would you would see a huge spike in numbers for Gamepass. Or do you think 250M or whatever gamers on the world's most popular platforms are skipping playing a game because 30M on a hugely impopular store/platform can "rent" it?
🤔
 
Fess said:
Gears 4 wasn't released on Steam. And E-Day isn't releasing on PS5. You're mixing everything up here. Doom TDA was day 1 on Steam and PS5. Why would a Gamepass release kill sales on those gigantic platforms? Like I said PS5 gamers aren't playing on Xbox and Steam gamers aren't playing on Xbox App. If they would you would see a huge spike in numbers for Gamepass.
Click to expand...

Mixed Gears 4 with Gears 5, i've said that's my bad. Gears 5 sales flopped because of Gamepass. Period! Same fate will be with E Day. Mind you, player numbers stats is meaningless. Doom TDA sales flopped because of Gamepass

Fess said:
Or do you think 250M or whatever gamers on the world's most popular platforms are skipping playing a game because 30M on a hugely impopular store/platform can "rent" it?
🤔
Click to expand...

I've said, if just there were million of copies sold on Xbox, Doom TDA would be successful, it wasn't because of Gamepass. You think Steam and PS5 will always do a heavy lifting on sales, just for Xbots to rent it and play it via Gamepass. Sure. :/
 
Last edited:
Mr Hyde said:
Absolutely one hundred percent. Microsoft needs to kill off the day 1-perk of Game Pass, it's obvious now it's not only killing the games commercial viability but also the studios making them as well.
Click to expand...
Yeah, and what about all the other games that did well? Just an example, forza Horizon or Clair obscure. I know. it's hard to admit but the dark ages wasn't that good of a Doom game
 
Hyper_hyper said:
You think Steam and PS5 will always do a heavy lifting on sales, just for Xbots to rent it and play it via Gamepass. Sure. :/
Click to expand...
If a game is good and there is hype, well yes, obviously. That's how it always is. Bigger userbase, higher sales numbers. Gamepass means there is more talk too, a game people like always get more exposure, user talk and streaming and videos becomes advertising. So I'd say sales will increase from Gamepass, assuming it's also on a platform where people buy games, as in Steam, PS5, Switch. Unless it's bad of course. If a game isn't good it's obviously not going to sell. Even on big userbases.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

Doom Dark Ages gets PSSR upgrade
2
62
899
Karim replied
  • Poll
LTTP: Doom: The Dark Ages
Opinion LTTP 
48
1K
PontificationEngine replied
DOOM: The Dark Ages | Revelations Expansion Previews - 10~12 Hours Length
2
80
916
xVodevil replied
DOOM: The Dark Ages | Revelations Releases July 7, 2026
News  2 3 4
184
2K
MaestroMike replied
For The First Time, A Denuvo Game From 2025 (Doom: The Dark Ages), Has Been Cracked By Pirates
Business Platform 
17
910
drotahorror replied
Top Bottom