2024 has been a tough year for employees at major AAA publishers and development studios, but for gamers, it’s been a nonstop ride of cognitive dissonance and blockbuster flops. With just a few weeks left in the year, it makes sense that we’d see one last big-budget title joining the growing list of commercial failures to round things out.
Titles like Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, Suicide Squad, Concord, Dragon’s Dogma 2, Dustborn, Skull and Bones, Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn, Unknown 9 and Dragon Age: The Veilguard, not to mention Assassin’s Creed Shadows, delayed until Black History Month highlight a troubling trend.
More large-scale flops have launched in the past two years than in the entire history of gaming. Many attribute this to the growing influence of diversity mandates, inclusivity quotas, and ESG criteria, which often prioritize pushing identity politics over delivering creative freedom and player enjoyment.
Published by Bethesda under Microsoft’s ownership, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle was expected to reinvigorate the iconic archaeologist’s legacy in gaming. Instead, its release has been clouded by controversy. Upon the game’s reveal, MachineGames, the studio behind the project, sparked backlash by openly proclaiming their intent to cater to “modern audiences,” a buzzword phrase criticized for signaling pandering inclusivity.
In today’s gaming landscape, consumers have grown increasingly frustrated with beloved franchises and new titles being reshaped to align with ideological trends. The industry’s apparent fixation on androgyny, the “transification” of entertainment, and the erosion of traditional feminine values has left many feeling alienated.
As heterosexual representation comes under scrutiny, the inclusion of an outspoken LGBT advocate by MachineGames to highlight how Indiana Jones and the Great Circle was designed as politically safe and inclusive for “modern audiences” felt less like a creative decision and more like a marketing plea. While this wasn’t the sole reason for skepticism, it certainly became the straw that broke the camel’s back for many.
MachineGames’ track record hasn’t helped matters. What began with a strong Wolfenstein reboot quickly devolved into an over-the-top anti-Nazi fever dream in its sequel, where a senile, incontinent Hitler and politically diverse supporting characters detracted from the narrative. And Wolfenstein: Youngblood, featuring two androgynous lesbian looking protagonists, was a widely panned blockbuster flop, killing the rebooted franchise.
Unfortunately for Bethesda, MachineGames, and their parent company Microsoft, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle has stumbled out of the gate with lackluster player count figures on Steam. This has sparked debates about whether Microsoft’s Game Pass model is a driving force behind the flops of contemporary game launches.
As part of Microsoft’s push to grow its Game Pass subscription service, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle was made available on the platform from day one. While this approach may appear consumer-friendly, it’s proving to be a double-edged sword for titles that depend on strong sales performance on storefronts like Steam.
With Game Pass subscribers gaining access at no additional cost, the incentive to purchase the game on other platforms diminishes, impacting key metrics like peak concurrent players and global sales.
The result? Indiana Jones and the Great Circle failed to leave a strong impression on Steam, falling short of the player counts seen with other AAA titles like STALKER 2 a game that also arrived on Game Pass.
This underscores a harsh reality: while subscription services like Game Pass can cannibalize sales, they don’t always do so entirely. In this case, however, the balance clearly tipped against Steam sales, making the game’s underperformance a particularly bitter pill to swallow.
Early access for buyers began on December 6th, but rather than jumping to conclusions based on a limited player pool, I waited until its full release on December 9th to provide a complete assessment of its performance.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle peaked at just 12,138 concurrent players on Steam, effectively doubling its early access numbers but still a dismal showing for a supposed big-budget AAA title from Microsoft, Bethesda, and MachineGames. This performance stands out even more when compared to STALKER 2, another highly anticipated game that debuted on Game Pass.
Despite its inclusion in Microsoft’s subscription service, STALKER 2 managed a launch peak of over 121,000 players on Steam and continues to maintain a robust daily peak of around 50,000 players several times higher than what Indiana Jones and the Great Circle ever achieved. This highlights that Game Pass doesn’t tarnish traditional sales, making the underperformance of Indiana Jones even harder to excuse.
This isn’t the first time Microsoft’s Game Pass strategy has come under fire for potentially undermining traditional sales. Titles like Hi-Fi Rush have faced similar criticisms, sparking debates among fans and industry analysts over whether the subscription model cannibalizes sales for games that rely on strong day-one revenue to justify their budgets.
After all, why pay full price for a game when it’s cheaper and more convenient to “rent” it through a subscription service that offers a library of other titles as a bonus?
While Game Pass undeniably increases accessibility, it also distorts the metrics of success, especially for games released across multiple platforms. Hi-Fi Rush, for instance, received widespread acclaim from critics and players but fell short commercially, leading to the closure of its developer, Tango Gameworks by Microsoft. The studio was eventually salvaged by KRAFTON, but the damage had already been done, raising questions about the sustainability of Microsoft’s approach for certain types of games
Steam remains a critical benchmark for gauging a game’s success on PC. Strong player counts and glowing reviews often lead to greater visibility and sustained sales over time. Conversely, when a high-profile title like Indiana Jones and the Great Circle noticeably underperforms on the platform, it fosters the narrative of it being a commercial failure.
Even if by some miracle the game saw decent engagement on Game Pass the issue is further exacerbated by the fact that non-live-service games generate minimal direct revenue from such subscription models as they don’t sustain players for prolonged periods of time or in other cases, such as Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II, even Game Pass subscribers were completely uninterested, highlighting a growing challenge for Microsoft’s strategy.
When it comes to video games “made for the modern audience,” Indiana Jones and the Great Circle stands out to me as the “best” in terms of gameplay and visual fidelity. However, it’s clear that the game was set up to fail by its owners, Microsoft, along with a series of other factors that seem intentionally designed to alienate a large portion of today’s gaming community, particularly with the ideological messaging that feels forced.
Personally, the requirement for modern hardware, such as NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 2000 series or AMD’s Radeon RX 6000 series GPUs, is absurd. MachineGames insists on hardware-accelerated ray tracing as a baseline, with real-time path tracing as an option to further tank your framerate, offering minimal visual improvements in return.
There’s no good reason for the game to have a strict ray tracing requirement other than the fact that MachineGames couldn’t be bothered to use baked lighting, which would not only deliver much better performance but also provide native support for older PC hardware.
A significant number of consumers are still using GeForce GTX GPUs, which are incompatible with the game’s ray tracing demands. This is especially frustrating since MachineGames marketed the game with NVIDIA DLSS frame generation as part of their recommended system specs, including support for path tracing, making the requirement feel even more unnecessary.
The underwhelming Steam performance of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle raises larger concerns about the future of offline, story-driven games in an age where subscription services increasingly bypass the need for outright purchases.
Despite being endlessly praised by video game journalist outlets, of which there’s a clear disconnect between paid media coverage and the actual gaming community, revealing that high review scores and positive press don’t automatically translate into strong sales.
Microsoft seems to be following in Sony’s footsteps with its $400 million failure in Concord, by pushing its sister studios to publicly support the game and using their clout to try and boost Indiana Jones, but so far that strategy has failed to drive the success it aimed for.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle stands as yet another cautionary tale of how subscription models like Game Pass have reshaped the gaming landscape for the worse. While these services claim to offer benefits to consumers, they’ve inadvertently undermined the success of their own games, generating millions in monthly revenue while costing their own titles millions in lost day-one sales.
However, Game Pass is not the sole culprit. A bigger issue lies in the growing trend of games being developed and marketed to a non-existent audience, pushing diversity and inclusivity at the expense of core gaming fans. These inoffensive, broad-appeal titles end up alienating consumers who are actively avoiding “woke” games produced by companies with openly ideological agendas.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is just one of many games released in 2024 that has bombed commercially, failing to connect with players and falling far short of key sales metrics.
