Obsidian has said in interviews that Grounded was also the sort of game that they would pitch and pitch for years and get rejection after rejection and probably wouldn't have happened without Game Pass. No one wanted a "co-op shooter with tower defense elements" from "an RPG company", especially with such a wild setting/theme, but Game Pass let them experiment and play so long as they made some "live service" concessions to get people to dip in/out over multiple months of Game Pass.

Obsidian seems to be thriving under Microsoft, doing all sorts of crazy things that their previous history hinted at that they were capable of but never had the resources or the publisher buy-in to explore. It's fascinating to watch so far. I'm curious to see what they do with the bigger budgets of Avowed and Outer Worlds 2.