Summary
- Xbox Game Pass will continue receiving exclusive first-party games on release day, staying exclusive to Xbox consoles.
- Xbox's multi-platform experiment with four titles is not a new release strategy, just testing the waters.
- Subscribers can enjoy day-one first-party titles without extra cost, while other platforms may have to wait.
It's been a pretty turbulent start to the year for the video game industry, and in particular, Xbox. Just a few weeks into 2024, a big rumor hit the internet claiming that Xbox was about to port some of its first-party exclusives to the Nintendo Switch, including Sea of Thieves and Hi-Fi Rush. This opened the floodgates for an unprecedented number of follow-up rumors, along with some pretty loud, and oftentimes far-fetched speculation, a lot of which revolved around Xbox Game Pass.
After weeks of online speculation from Xbox fans, Game Pass subscribers, industry experts, and just about everyone else, Xbox's Phil Spencer announced that the next episode of the Official Xbox Podcast would shed some more light on these rumors and the future of Xbox. Airing last Thursday, this episode of the Official Xbox Podcast did exactly that, and as is often the case in this industry, it turns out that a lot of the discourse online was pretty redundant, with Xbox's official future plans being very understandable. That being said, Xbox Game Pass fans might still be wondering just how these new plans might affect the service.
How Xbox's New Approach to Exclusivity Could Affect Xbox Game Pass
Xbox Game Pass Will Continue to Receive Exclusives on Day One
During the 23-minute episode of the Official Xbox Podcast, Phil Spencer, Sarah Bond, and Matt Booty openly discussed the company's upcoming plans to bring four first-party exclusives over to other platforms, and Xbox Game Pass was mentioned consistently throughout the discussion. Matt Booty, the President of Gaming Content and First-Party Studios at Xbox, expressly stated that Xbox Game Pass is going to remain exclusive to Xbox consoles, refuting the rumors that Game Pass could be coming to Nintendo Switch, something that's been speculated on for years now.
Directly following that statement, Booty explicitly said that Xbox Game Pass will continue to receive first-party Xbox games on their release date. During the podcast, the panel directly referred to games such as Indiana Jones and the Great Circle and Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2 as examples of the day-one support that Xbox Game Pass will continue to receive in the future. For these first-party games, nothing is going to change at all right now—based on this podcast, it doesn't seem like it'll be changing anytime soon, either.
Xbox also used this special podcast episode as an opportunity to announce that Xbox is going to start rolling out some Activision Blizzard games for Xbox Game Pass soon, beginning with Diablo 4 on March 28. It's currently unclear when other Activision Blizzard games will join the service, but the panel mentioned that this was only the beginning of the rollout. It's also a little unclear if Activision Blizzard games will be day-one Game Pass titles moving forward, with the panel not specifically confirming or denying that.
According to Sarah Bond, Xbox Game Pass currently has 34 million subscribers, which is quite a significant growth compared to its 25 million subscribers at the start of January 2022.
Xbox's Multi-Platform Experiments Seem Like They Could Only Be a Good Thing for Game Pass
Right now, only four Xbox exclusives are heading over to other platforms, and during this podcast episode, Xbox was refreshingly open about how much of an experiment this all actually is. Phil Spencer and the rest of the podcast panel made it very clear that this is not necessarily the start of a new Xbox release strategy, but simply a testing of the waters. If this strategy works out well for the yet-unannounced four titles, then it seems likely that Xbox will continue to experiment with it in the future, but the company is taking everything one step at a time.
Regardless of Xbox's future exclusivity plans, its current decision to port four titles to other platforms seems like it'd be a win-win, not just for Xbox itself and the chosen titles, but for Xbox Game Pass subscribers as well. Game Pass subscribers will continue to receive day-one first-party titles at no extra cost while those on other platforms will likely have to wait a year or so to even have the opportunity to pay full-price to play the same game.
Xbox Game Pass Ultimate
Xbox Game Pass Ultimate is the highest tier of Microsoft's flagship game subscription service that offers over 100 game titles that you can play with a single purchase, making it one of the most outstanding value propositions of the Xbox ecosystem to date.
Checkbox: control the expandable behavior of the extra info