Xbox had already admitted that Game Pass was not growing at the pace it expected, but a new report now puts a specific number behind that problem. A source speaking to The Wall Street Journal claims the service currently has around 30 million subscribers, potentially five million fewer than the figure known in 2025. That is a painful gap for Microsoft, which had previously projected 77 million users for this stage.

Most of the discussion around Xbox’s major restructuring has focused on layoffs, the immediate loss of 1,600 jobs, and the separation of several studios, but the state of Game Pass is just as important to the wider story. Microsoft spent years building much of its gaming strategy around the subscription model, while first-party releases, cloud services, and the acquisition of Activision Blizzard were all intended to make the catalogue more appealing and attract a larger paying audience. According to a person familiar with the matter who spoke anonymously to The Wall Street Journal, however, Game Pass currently has around 30 million members. That remains a substantial user base, but it is far from the growth curve Microsoft had originally expected.

The company no longer shares official Game Pass figures as often as it once did. The last major information about the service’s performance emerged in 2025, when a LinkedIn profile connected to an Xbox employee referred to 35 million subscribers. If the Wall Street Journal report is accurate, the service has since lost roughly five million users, an especially uncomfortable development for a subscription platform Microsoft positioned as one of the central pillars of its entire Xbox strategy.

The reported total is even more serious because documents that surfaced during legal proceedings connected to Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard outlined a much more ambitious target. The Redmond company expected Game Pass to reach 77 million subscribers by this point, meaning the newly reported total does not even come close to half of that original projection. The difference is not merely a matter of slower growth, but evidence of a very large gap between Microsoft’s forecast and the service’s actual performance. It may also help explain why Xbox’s whole gaming operation is now being subjected to such a dramatic restructuring.

Asha Sharma, Xbox’s chief executive, had already addressed the current state of Game Pass. In the message outlining the new restructuring, she said Microsoft entered the ninth console generation with a smaller installed user base and a higher cost structure, which led the company to focus on Game Pass, multiplatform releases, and a broader content portfolio as paths to growth. Sharma said those business lines created significant value, but “they haven’t grown at the rate we expected.” The newly reported subscriber estimate gives a much more concrete meaning to what had previously sounded like a carefully worded admission.

Price Increases Cost Game Pass Many Subscribers

The reported struggles will not come as a complete surprise to anyone who has followed recent Xbox developments. Sharma had already acknowledged that Game Pass lost a significant number of subscribers after the service raised its prices in 2025, when the cost of entry to the catalogue increased sharply. Microsoft responded with a price reduction in April in an effort to make the subscription more attractive again, but it also changed part of its content strategy at the same time. The company stepped back from the earlier promise that every new Call of Duty game would arrive in the service immediately, even though that was one of the biggest reasons many players saw value in Game Pass.

Xbox must now find out whether lower prices, a revised content plan, and wider multiplatform releases can put Game Pass back on a path of growth. Thirty million subscribers is still a figure most services would envy, but Microsoft did not measure success against that level. Compared with its own earlier ambitions, Game Pass remains a long way from the result Xbox expected, and the numbers now make it far clearer why the company sees a full rethink of its gaming business model as necessary.

Source: 3DJuegos