Reports have revealed new subscriber numbers for Xbox Game Pass, and it’s no wonder Microsoft is starting to get cold feet about the service.
Xbox Game Pass has been Microsoft’s big gamble over the last couple of console generations, with the company hinging its marketing around the subscription service, in its hopes to turn it into the ‘Netflix of gaming.’
As we’ve seen with this week’s layoffs, along with those awkward Call Of Duty adverts, it hasn’t paid off. In fact, Xbox is now trying to pivot back to prioritising the console as part of a brand ‘reset’.
Microsoft last reported Xbox Game Pass subscriber numbers in 2024, when they were at 34 million. However, reports have now revealed how much it has dropped in the years since then.
According to Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal, the subscription service currently has 30 million subscribers, which marks a drop of four million over the past two years.
The main reason for this decrease is likely to be last year’s 50% price hike for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, which was partially reversed in April this year.
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Last month, Xbox’s chief strategy officer, Matthew Ball, admitted Xbox lost ‘millions of subscribers’ following last year’s price increase. While it’s unclear if this was four million precisely, as reported above, it’s clearly been the driving factor behind the drop.
Either way, 30 million subscribers is far below Microsoft’s initial expectations. According to court documents published during the legal battle for its acquisition of Activision Blizzard, Microsoft set of goal of reaching 77 million subscribers by fiscal year 2026, i.e. June 2027.
Xbox CEO Asha Sharma admitted that Xbox Game Pass had fallen short of expectations in a note to Xbox staff, ahead of this week’s layoffs.
‘To grow, we bet on Game Pass, multi-platform, and a broader portfolio of content,’ Sharma wrote. ‘While those businesses have created meaningful value, they did not grow at the pace we expected.
‘As that happened, our core business weakened, and we added more teams, more investment, and more time, hoping for a better outcome.’
The big question is where Xbox Game Pass goes from here. Presumably it will be a component in Microsoft’s next console, Project Helix, but Sharma doesn’t seem like much of a fan and it’s possible she may be looking for a way out before the next generation.
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