There’s been a lot of questions about how Xbox’s Game Pass subscription service will fare as the company aims to grow its subscriber base while also adding in dozens of day one internally made games. While we don’t know exactly where the service is in terms of numbers, it seems it is at least steadily growing. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced earlier today that their subscription service had set a record for quarterly revenue and that the PC portion of the subscription had seen growth of 30% in subscribers.
Game Pass grows steadily as First Party hits its stride
Game Pass subscriber growth stagnated a few years ago as the service failed to meaningfully grow in 2022, and the latest numbers we have put the service at 34 million subscribers as of February 2024. Recent comments by Satya Nadella suggest the service has grown since then, especially on the PC side, but we still have not gotten updated numbers from Microsoft. 2025 aims to be a big test for the service as huge games like Avowed, Doom: The Dark Ages, Ninja Gaiden 4, Fable and more will all be day one entries into Game Pass.
How many subscribers Xbox can ultimately reach before reaching pure saturation or a decline isn’t clear at the moment, but the content Xbox desperately needs to try and attract new subscribers is on the way. Many of these games will also be launching on other non-Xbox devices, meaning Microsoft is not solely relying on Game Pass growth to make their business make sense. It will be intriguing to see where the service is at a year from now after a potentially loaded calendar year has had time to impact Game Pass.
