Every gamer has dreamed about having an infinite library of games to choose from. Perhaps that began with envy of that one friend you had growing up who seemed to own every game, or the kid-in-a-candy-store feeling of browsing the aisles in GameStop or Game Station. We’ve all had that dream. But video gaming is an expensive hobby – the current standard price of a triple-A game is $70, with another $10 increase looming on the horizon. Meanwhile, the world’s other major entertainment mediums – movies, music, and TV – have embraced subscription-funded streaming.
With this as the backdrop, it’s no wonder one man had an ambitious vision: what if you paid $9.99 a month for access to a whole cornucopia of games? After all, if it could work for film and television, why wouldn’t it work for video games? Back in 2017, former Xbox head Phil Spencer’s novel idea felt like it had arrived at just the right time. So how did Game Pass go from being Xbox’s innovative new spark to setting the company on fire?
In the mid-2010s, Xbox had just one problem. Unfortunately, that problem was the Xbox One. The console at the very heart of the platform was suffocating the company, thanks to a troubled launch caused by a miscommunication over multimedia and a need for an “always on” internet connection, plus the underwhelming innovation that was the Kinect camera bundled in every overpriced console unit. By the end of its generational run, the Xbox One had sold just 58 million units, multiple millions fewer than its predecessor and far fewer than its rival, the 117 million unit-selling PlayStation 4. Xbox’s next generation needed a big, bold idea if it were to compete with the next PlayStation – enter Phil Spencer and Game Pass.
Spearheaded by Spencer, Game Pass was originally conceived as a games rental service before Netflix and Spotify’s success suggested a potential gap in the market for a gaming equivalent. It was a big, bold, and risky bet for Microsoft, but Spencer’s acquisition of Minecraft developer Mojang for $2.5 billion in 2014 proved to many at Microsoft that his ambitious gambles had significant potential to pay for themselves. The service launched in June 2017 at $9.99 and offered 100 backwards-compatible titles. By the start of the following year, Game Pass had expanded into its now-marquee offer: day one availability for all first-party titles, including Halo and Gears of War. This would be the first of many big Game Pass swings from Xbox. Initial feedback from both the industry and players alike was optimistic, with Forbes calling it “a bright feather in Microsoft’s cap going forward” and GamesIndustry.biz listing Phil Spencer as one of its 2018 People of the Year.The enthusiasm for putting brand-new first-party games onto the service the day they launched wasn’t universal, though. The service received big pushback from publishers who believed it would devalue games, including the likes of Take Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick and former Xbox Game Studios VP Shannon Loftis. As early as the summer of 2018, industry analysts like Brendan Sinclair flagged the oblique nature of streaming metrics, boiled down to “times streamed” or “average time played”, which disabled developers from using key statistics like copies sold to wager financing for their next project. Xbox did well to counteract this negative press, most notably securing Bethesda’s support of Game Pass following its acquisition of the company, which likely curried favour from other publishers wary of Game Pass. That being said, once you bring a studio into the first-party stable, they’re a lot more inclined to follow the party line – at least publically. Following his departure, former Bethesda VP Pete Hines made his feelings on Game Pass pretty clear: “When you talk about a subscription that relies on content, if you don’t figure out how to balance the needs of the service and the people running the service with the people who are providing the content – without which your subscription is worth jack shit – then you have a real problem.”The level of money Xbox poured into Game Pass is eye-watering – the company paid up to $300 million for Jedi: Survivor and Suicide Squad.“Hines wasn’t the only one frustrated by the service. Game Pass received consistent criticism from Xbox staffers who believed it would eat into profits, concerned over how the company could possibly expect to make its money back when it was taking all its $60 first-party titles, each costing millions of dollars to develop, and placing them behind a mere $9.99 threshold. An amazing bargain for players, for sure, but it’s not hard to see why there was cause for concern within Xbox. However, a library of legacy games and a brand-new first-party title arriving every now and again far from lived up to the ‘Netflix for Games’ moniker the service was trying to earn. Xbox needed to expand the Game Pass catalogue in a big way. So, in 2018, Phil Spencer went on a spending spree.The level of money Xbox poured into Game Pass is eye-watering – leaked internal documents show that the company was paying up to $300 million for Star Wars Jedi: Survivor and Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, and these are just some of the deals we’re aware of. Alongside licensing third-party triple-As, Xbox purchased a slew of studios with the intention of putting them to work on Xbox (and thus Game Pass) exclusives: Undead Labs, Ninja Theory, Compulsion Games, Obsidian, inExile, Double Fine, Bethesda. With hindsight, these acquisitions are confusing. Undead Labs has yet to release a game since their acquisition, Ninja Theory’s Hellblade series is critically acclaimed but financially underwhelming, and Double Fine’s best-selling-game to date only sold 1.7 million copies. None of these studios are money-printers. And so, perhaps inevitably considering Microsoft’s financial-first approach to game development, all three of those aforementioned studios (plus a few more) are no longer part of the Xbox studio stable, cast aside in profit-saving exercises.Still safe is Bethesda, although that’s likely more to do with its priceless Elder Scrolls and Fallout IP than its more recent output. As of April 2026, Alinea Analytics estimates Starfield’s revenue sits at roughly $300 million across all platforms. Sounds like a success to me – except according to leaked Bethesda documents, it anticipated $1 billion in the first year, a figure surely sabotaged by the Xbox and PC-exclusive RPG being readily available on Game Pass from the second it landed. Compare that to Skyrim making $650 million in its first month and things don’t look rosy, even considering that a returning franchise typically trumps a brand-new one. As it stands, three years and a PS5 release later, Starfield is Bethesda Softworks’ 14th best-selling game of the 21st century. It was undoubtedly intended to kick off a brand-new franchise, and that revenue has surely all but confirmed Starfield’s fate. And so the idea of Game Pass as a financial black hole begins to become impossible to ignore. Game Pass needed a bonafide, yearly money printer – something like Call of Duty. Xbox’s decision to purchase Activision-Blizzard for a staggering $75.4 billion was two-fold: it absorbed the publisher’s extensive catalog into Game Pass, and it opened Xbox to the mobile gaming market via Candy Crush Saga maker King. Some questioned how this helped Xbox’s languishing hardware sales, and Phil Spencer answered: Xbox’s new strategy was forget the console, focus on the software. Perhaps the clearest example of this is the 10-year, non-exclusive commitment between Xbox and PlayStation for Call of Duty, which directly undermined the clear potential for a hike in Xbox hardware sales and consequential Game Pass subscriptions. Once again, the industry regarded this big swing from Phil Spencer optimistically, with Kantan Games’ Dr. Serkan Toto saying that the deal was “out of this world and will change the industry forever.” But many remained sceptical of what was the largest video game acquisition in history, fearful of the industry becoming entrenched in continuous consolidation, similar to the slow, consistent hunger of Hollywood’s biggest players. Game Pass was rapidly reaching over $100 billion of investment from Xbox by this point. Did it pay off? Well, you’ve read the headline.The Activision-Blizzard acquisition began a series of cataclysmic financial consequences for Xbox. 2024’s Black Ops 6 is the highest-grossing game in Call of Duty’s 23-year history – but 82% of all sales came from PlayStation. While Xbox had the smaller share, Game Pass scuppered Microsoft’s chance to make a fortune in COD’s most financially successful year ever. According to an anonymous Xbox employee via Bloomberg, the company lost $300 million in console and PC sales as a direct result of placing its latest mega-shooter on the service. Why would anyone pay $70 for a game that they could pay $15 to access alongside 400 others? To make matters worse, 2025’s Black Ops 7 ranked as the 5th best-selling game of the year, the franchise’s lowest ranking since 2008’s World at War. Consequently, advertising for the upcoming Modern Warfare 4 makes it clear: if you want to play it, you’ll have to buy it. It’s one of many decisions taken by new Xbox boss Asha Sharma in a wide-ranging attempt at damage control.Xbox had effectively devalued the world’s leading shooter franchise, surely one of the deciding factors that forced it to raise Game Pass prices by 50% from $19.99 to $29.99 a month. It was a move that pushed millions of players to unsubscribe from the service, an exodus that saw Microsoft’s subscription cancellation website temporarily go down. Xbox projected that by 2026, Game Pass would have 77 million subscribers – it currently has 30 million. “Xbox projected that by 2026, Game Pass would have 77 million subscribers – it currently has 30 million. When you consider that just two years ago, Microsoft reported having 34 million Game Pass subscribers, the picture becomes even bleaker. The price of Xbox Series S/X consoles has also increased by $100 – $150, marking the first-ever time an Xbox has been more expensive to buy after launch. Sharma recently made the shocking confession that for every dollar Xbox makes, they are losing 67 cents, a dire business scenario which fuelled the “bloodbath” of 1,600 job losses across the company, with more to come. Many of Spencer’s studio acquisitions, including Double Fine, Ninja Theory, Undead Labs and Compulsion Games, have been sold off or allowed to go independent in a desperate bid to halt the company’s projected death spiral. Phil Spencer tried to save Xbox, but his legacy may be remembered as the man who nearly killed the company. But was this ever going to work? This isn’t the first time a gaming subscription service has been attempted. OnLive, Ouya and Google Stadia all attempted different variations on the form, each crashing and burning in different ways. Even Sony’s long-forgotten PlayStation Now service struggled to find a foothold in the market, often criticized for its high prices and its finicky server connectivity. But technical competency was never Xbox’s problem. The real issue is the approach to content. I myself am a Game Pass subscriber, and I can tell you my best experiences haven’t been from playing Xbox’s big triple-A titles – it’s been the likes of Raw Fury’s Blue Prince and Interior Night’s As Dusk Falls. In my opinion, Game Pass should have served as the natural evolution to Xbox Live Arcade, the digital download service through which Xbox popularized indie games, platforming the likes of Braid, Castle Crashers, and Limbo. Smaller budgeted and smaller scoped independent games are now more popular than ever at least in some part because of the 360’s Arcade service, and transforming Game Pass into a bustling indie library could work to both rapidly shrink the costs of running the service, as well as retain more subscribers. Players don’t consume games like they do film and TV, particularly not the giant, prestige behemoths the triple-A industry creates. They’re much more of an investment, and for the average player – the person who plays just a few games every year – the recurring cost of Game Pass is hardly a good deal compared to the one-off cost of an open-world game they’ll play for the next eight months. That’s why indie makes sense for Xbox, and why they have become more embraced than ever in a time-starved world – they don’t take 60+ hours to beat. You can dip in and out of them as you need. You could play two or three in a month. They make sense for a subscription service. Perhaps for once, Xbox could capitalize on its own success and turn Game Pass into what it should be: a celebration of lesser-known, innovatively creative games, rather than the financial hail mary it was introduced as. But, considering it has just thrown away several of its more innovative studios in favour of doubling down on expensive mega-franchises that will, presumably, be available on Game Pass day one, it seems more likely that Xbox will kill Game Pass before Game Pass kills Xbox. Sab Astley is a freelance writer who has written for IGN, Polygon, TotalFilm, Rolling Stone, Radio Times, and Metro UK.
