Xbox Game Pass reaches 25 million subscribers
Suppose there were still any people with doubts about the importance of the Xbox Game Pass for Microsoft. In that case, I want to think that those doubts were mitigated entirely yesterday, after the news of the purchase of Activision Blizard by Microsoft.
An informative bombshell that has already directly impacted its competition, with Sony as the primary example of this. Its echoes will undoubtedly continue to resonate for some time in the sector.
This is not Microsoft’s first operation in this sense to, among other things, reinforce the increasingly attractive catalog of Xbox Game Pass. Not even a year and a half have passed since another operation that also left us with our mouths open to all, the purchase of Zenimax, with which the catalogs of Bethesda, Id Software, and Obsidian joined the Redmond game subscription service offer.
But the service does not only live from large studios. Another of the strengths of Xbox Game Pass is that, as we have seen on many occasions in the past, games from independent studios also have a place in its catalog. And it is that this is another of the objectives that were marked in Redmond from the first moment, that the offer was substantially varied, with all the genres represented in its proposal.
Monthly we see how new titles are added and, although some come out, as a general rule, the balance always shows a positive result, with more games coming in than coming out of Xbox Game Pass. As proof of this, tomorrow, Hitman Trilogy, Rainbow Six Extraction, Pupperazzi, and WindJammers 2, among others, will debut on the service. Every fortnight, Microsoft informs about these catalog extensions.
In addition, in its Ultimate mode, the service also provides access to its cloud gaming platform, Xbox Cloud, which includes an integral part of the Xbox Game Pass catalog, and which, for example, allows us to enjoy some classic Xbox titles, like the Fable saga, on PC. And I know of more than one person for whom this possibility alone makes the service so interesting as to subscribe to it.
And given the numbers, it seems that Microsoft’s strategy is paying off. Since the launch of the Xbox Game Pass version for PC, we have seen sustained growth, with some peaks such as the one that occurred with the launch of Microsoft Flight Simulator. The service has just reached a significant milestone, and that is that Xbox Game Pass would have reached 25 million subscribers, a number that was made public at the same time as the acquisition of Activision Blizzard.
And this is an important detail because if this operation is finally confirmed and Activision Blizzard games begin to reach Xbox Game Pass (something may still have to take a few months until it happens), it will not be strange that these numbers grow even more, confirming the success of those from Redmond in launching this service.
