Xbox Confirms Yet Another Phil Spencer-Era Initiative Is Dead

Project Moorcroft, an initiative related to game demos and Xbox Game Pass previously teased by Microsoft, no longer appears to be happening. This was an initiative first teased by Xbox in June 2022. It was going to allow developers to offer pre-release demos for their titles through Xbox Game Pass for notoriety and other, more analytics-driven, purposes. At the time, Moorcroft was planned to kick off within a year, but it never materialized.

Now, it seems like it never will. ID@Xbox global director Guy Richards revealed as much in a recent interview with The Game Business. He framed it as a way Xbox was experimenting with supporting indie developers before ultimately moving on to other demo-related initiatives and features on the Xbox Store.

Richards called Project Moorcroft "a program where we were experimenting with some ideas for how we can support demos on Xbox" before going on to highlight different ways ID@Xbox has done that recently. That includes game demo festivals and the ability to easily wishlist and be notified about game launches and discounts on the Xbox Store. "Demos is an area we’ve been focusing on, but in a slightly different direction to what Moorcroft was," Richards ultimately admits.