The company has spoken openly about the free Xbox Game Pass as a potential business model for emerging markets…

Microsoft is exploring the possibility of offering access to Xbox Game Pass in exchange for viewing advertisements. The CMA believes that by adding Activision Blizzard’s library to Game Pass, it could “win” the subscription services war.

Tim Stuart, Xbox CFO, recently told attendees at the Wells Fargo TMT Summit that the company wants to bring Game Pass to “every screen on which you can play a game”.

One possible way to expand the reach of the service, he suggested, is to offer ad-supported game streaming to gamers in emerging markets.

“The vision I like to talk about is we have xCloud game streaming, so you can subscribe to Game Pass Ultimate and you can stream hundreds of games to really any endpoint that has a browser experience,” Stuart said, according to a report from TweakTown.

“For models like Africa, or India, Southeast Asia, maybe places that aren’t console-first, you can say, ‘hey, do you want to watch 30 seconds of an ad and then get two hours of game streaming?”

“Africa is, you know, 50% of the population is 23 years old or younger with a growing disposable income base, all with cell phones and mobile devices, not a lot of high-end disposable income, generally-speaking.”

“So, we can go in with our own business models and say — there’s millions of gamers we would never have been able to address, and now we can go in with our business models.”

Windows Central also claims to have seen evidence that such a business model could be in production ahead of a possible launch next year.

The Title_OS security researcher reportedly recently shared snippets of code from the Xbox OS. These suggest offering Game Pass access in 15-minute blocks on an “Earned Time” basis.

Last year, it was also claimed that Microsoft conducted a survey of gamers about the introduction of a cheaper, ad-supported tier of Game Pass.

Source: TweakTown, Windows Central, X