It’s been deduced that in 2023 alone, Microsoft added $5,000+ worth of video games to its Xbox Game Pass service, according to The Loadout.
To be more precise, the total comes to $5,139.54, which is roughly £4,068 in the U.K. and CA$6,852 in Canada. These figures come from calculating the price of roughly 150 new additions to the service and covers Game Pass on Xbox consoles, PC, and the cloud. But this doesn’t include the selection of games featured in the Xbox Game Pass Core tier since all of those were already available through Game Pass before the tier launched.
A monthly breakdown also reveals October as the biggest month for the service, with $604.86 worth of games, including the likes of Forza Motorsport (which launched that month) and Gotham Knights. In addition, it’s believed Xbox Game Pass subscribers got a better deal than PC Game Pass subscribers since, when taking into account platform exclusives and PC Game Pass being slightly cheaper, Xbox owners saw access to $4,665.73 worth of games while PC owners saw $4,649.76 worth.
All this ultimately reiterates is that Microsoft isn’t slowing down when it comes to supporting Game Pass. With Microsoft now the owner of Activision Blizzard, the 2024 value of Game Pass could wind up being even higher once the company begins adding games from franchises like Call of Duty.
But while there’s no denying Game Pass is great value for money with how much is available, it’s difficult to tell exactly how well it’s performing since Microsoft refuses to share subscriber numbers. Craig McNary, senior director of global brand and integrated marketing at Xbox, briefly mentioned Game Pass reaching 30 million subscribers this past October on his LinkedIn account, but that detail was swiftly removed. According to Windows Central, the last official milestone was 25 million subscribers.
That may sound like a lot, but Microsoft’s financial reports from 2021 and 2022 showed that Game Pass had failed to meet its growth targets, costing Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and other executives their annual bonuses (thanks, Metro). It’s easy to assume that the same thing happened for 2023 too, since, as noted by Forbes, October 2023’s financial report omitted growth targets for Game Pass, sharing only a target for Xbox overall. All this makes it very easy to assume that Game Pass is either struggling or is consistently failing to meet its growth targets, and Microsoft simply doesn’t want to admit it.
This would also explain Microsoft’s decision to raise the price of Game Pass subscriptions and its apparent interest in offering a new, cheaper tier with ads to make extra money. Not to mention its desire to buy Activision Blizzard; it’s a way to get even more games on the service and thus potentially attract new customers. Whether this strategy will pay off, though, remains to be seen.
