FixForce Needs Game Pass Because Steam Never Showed Up

FixForce hit Xbox Game Pass on July 17 as a six-player repair romp, after Steam peaked at 24 players at once. Surgent Studios priced the 1.0 build at $7.99 and shipped Xbox Play Anywhere with a Day One slot on Ultimate, Premium, and PC Game Pass.

The pitch is workplace slapstick: robot fixers, a drill-wrench, and heads that pop off on purpose. The subscription is what actually put bodies on the site.

Game Pass Staffed a Crew Steam Never Did

Steam Early Access opened on March 12. SteamDB logged the all-time peak three days later, on March 15: 24 people in the same game at once. A six-player extraction loop cannot run a public lobby on a number that small. Friends lists can. A Day One Game Pass drop can.

Megan Spurr, senior community lead for Xbox Game Pass, put FixForce on the July 17 Game Pass wave note for Cloud, Xbox Series X|S, and PC, on Ultimate, Premium, and PC Game Pass. Fogpiercer landed the same day on PC only. FixForce was the one you could stream to a console.

The Xbox Store widget on Surgent’s later ID@Xbox post showed 172 ratings. Steam’s own page still files the paid PC build as Positive, with 91% of 36 Steam reviews in the yes column. Those two figures do not contradict each other. They describe two different rooms. One is a quiet shop. The other is a subscription queue that can, in theory, spit out five other robots.

WHERE THE CREW ACTUALLY IS

Steam also names the company it wants. The store page files FixForce next to RV There Yet?, Peak, R.E.P.O., Content Warning, and Lethal Company, then Portal, Garry’s Mod, and Ratchet & Clank. That is a PC Discord genre. Xbox got the console port and the 1.0 map on the same Friday, which is the only way a random squad ever clocks in.

From Grief Games to a Repair Van

Surgent is a London studio founded in 2019 by actor and designer Abubakar Salim, the voice of Bayek in Assassin’s Creed Origins and Alyn of Hull in House of the Dragon. The Surgent Studios selected work page still leads with Tales of Kenzera: ZAU, the BAFTA-winning 2024 metroidvania, then Dead Take, the 2025 first-person horror title, then FixForce.

ZAU came out on April 23, 2024 with Electronic Arts as publisher. Dead Take arrived on July 31, 2025 with Pocketpair Publishing. FixForce is the first one the studio pushed out the door itself. Salim said the team saw the chaos as it came together and chose speed over another publisher pass. He also said they had already made a game about grief and a game about abuse, and wanted “a little bit of silly, stupid fun for a second.”

On Reddit he described the business math in plainer terms. ZAU took three years. Dead Take was built in about six months after the studio decided bigger, slower projects were a bad way to stay alive. FixForce reused that short pipeline and jumped into co-op, a space the company had not shipped in before. The self-published jump after two story games is the whole bet: a cheap party loop instead of another heavy single-player.

THE THREE-GAME PIVOT

1. 2019: Salim founds the studio in London, later the home of ZAU, Dead Take, and FixForce.
2. April 23, 2024: Tales of Kenzera: ZAU ships as an EA-published metroidvania.
3. July 31, 2025: Dead Take ships as Pocketpair-published horror.
4. March 12, 2026: FixForce enters Early Access on Steam and the Epic Games Store.
5. July 17, 2026: Version 1.0 launches on PC and Xbox, with Game Pass from day one.

He framed the joke as British builder culture: make quota, clock out, try not to get sacked by the Foreman. The robots are the labour gag. Game Pass is the staffing department.

How a FixForce Shift Runs

A round drops one to six repair bots from a utility van onto a broken worksite, then starts a clock. You hunt spare parts for machines that will not run, build scrap towers and bridges with the drill-wrench, and extract before the shift ends. Fall in the water, eat a bad landing, or catch a rogue bot and your head pops off. Teammates snap it onto a fresh body. You can also finish the job as a scooting, jumping, swimming head.

Dana Thompson, Surgent’s marketing and communications director, wrote that detachable heads began as a spectator mode. Players started trash talking from the neck down, so the team added head movement and then revival. Death became another way to play. Heads-only pockets on the map exist on purpose. Revenge, she noted, is optional.

THE CLOCK-IN LOOP

• Drop in: The van dumps the crew near machines that need parts, with a quota and a timer.
• Build out: Scrap becomes towers, bridges, and ramps; height and distance follow how much junk you find.
• Fix and sideline: The wrench repairs beacons and can launch gear, while odd jobs pay extra credits.
• Keep the battery: Charge is not only for the bot. It also powers kit on the site, and running it down is a run-killer.
• Clock out: Get bodies, or at least heads, back to the van before the Foreman calls the contract.

Proximity chat is part of the gag. Thompson said testers loved the Doppler scream of a friend falling past them, so the team kept distance in the audio and added finger lasers for people too far away to talk. The lobby now has a practice space, including hoops, because most groups wanted to mash buttons rather than sit through a lesson.

Heads, Helium and the Resort Map

Version 1.0 did not just port the early-access maps. It added RESORT, a half-finished tropical job, plus a Mystery Barrel with random and sometimes catastrophic effects and a Helium Canister that turns proximity chat into squeaks. Cross-play went live with that build. You can keep working as a loose head, which is the feature the studio will not shut up about.

Thompson’s ID@Xbox write-up is blunt about what playtests rewarded. Smooth shifts bored people. Collapsed bridges did not.

If we know one thing, it’s this: heads are gonna fly.

Dana Thompson, Marketing and Communications Director, Surgent Studios, in the heads are gonna fly design post

She also wrote that the team learned people enjoy the disasters more than the shifts where everything is smooth, a point she made in the same heads are gonna fly design post four days after launch. Failure, in her phrasing, is only a problem if it stops the fun. A collapsed bridge is another puzzle. A pile of junk and discarded robot bodies is a tower. Credits from successful repairs buy tools and ugly uniform tweaks for the next drop.

The studio put that 1.0 list on X the morning the Xbox build went live, with a trailer and a punch list that reads like a safety briefing written by someone who wants the opposite.

https://x.com/surgentstudios/status/2078028432026333254

Who Can Play FixForce on Game Pass

Ultimate, Premium, and PC Game Pass include the game. Cloud streaming is bundled on Premium and Ultimate. Essential does not include that stream; the Xbox Store says you have to buy the game to cloud-play on Essential. Console online play still needs Essential, Premium, or Ultimate even after a purchase, which is the usual Xbox multiplayer gate.

The $7.99 Xbox Store listing flags Xbox Play Anywhere, so one buy covers Series X|S and Xbox on PC, with cloud saves and cross-platform co-op. It is optimized for Series X|S and marked Handheld Optimized, with six accessibility features and 13 languages. ESRB has it at Everyone 10+ for fantasy violence, with a Users Interact tag. Single-player is in the capability list, which matters when the fifth friend does not show.

GAME PASS ACCESS BY TIER

That split is the quiet stakeholder map. A living-room crew on Ultimate can fill a van for $0 extra. A solo Essential subscriber looking at cloud gets a buy wall. Play Anywhere at least lets a PC friend and a console friend share the same save if someone pays once.

Launch Weekend Stutter Hit Xbox First

The designed disasters showed up. The undesigned one showed up faster. On launch day, Xbox players in the 1.0 thread flagged hitching hard enough that one of them called the 1.0 build trash and threatened to uninstall. On July 20, Surgent posted housekeeping: Xbox had stuttering issues, a fix was coming, and unplugging headphones from the controller reduced the hitch in the meantime.

Steam Community patch notes for 1.0.3, dated July 28, list a major fix for intermittent stutter on Xbox, plus translation repairs and bad challenge unlocks. Patch 1.0.4 followed on August 3. That is a short, ugly loop for a physics party game: the joke is falling apart on purpose, and the Series build was falling apart on a headset jack.

By August the public chatter had thinned to Game Pass roundups and the odd stream. Steam still does not look like a place you wander into a six-player van. The Xbox Store still lists Premium and Ultimate as the included path, which is the only scale the design has ever had. Credits, cosmetics, and better tools assume you come back. Coming back assumes five other people still have the app installed.

Surgent can keep patching the wrench. It cannot patch a friends list. The Foreman still wants six robots on site, and Game Pass is the only contractor that ever sent them.

Frequently Asked Questions

How Many Players Can Join a FixForce Match?

Xbox lists online co-op and online multiplayer at 2-6, plus a single-player mode if the rest of the crew is offline. Cross-platform co-op is on the Store capability list, so a Series X|S bot and an Xbox PC bot can share the same worksite when the session is set up that way.

What Age Rating Does FixForce Carry?

ESRB rates it Everyone 10+ for fantasy violence and adds a Users Interact line. That matches the slapstick tone: rogue bots and flying heads, not a horror pass like Dead Take.

Does FixForce Run on Steam Deck?

Valve marks it Steam Deck Verified. The Steam page asks for 15 GB of space, Windows 10 or 11, and a 64-bit setup, with full controller support and Steam Cloud on the feature list.

How Many Achievements Does FixForce Have?

Steam and Xbox both ship 49 achievements, and the Xbox list is worth 1,000 Gamerscore with none hidden. Several of those asks are crew gags, including extracting together and riding out on the van roof.