According to the Xbox CEO, a sustainable and even growing model has been created with Microsoft’s subscription-based Xbox Game Pass model.
Previously, we wrote about sceptical voices (including ex-Sony boss Shawn Layden, who doesn’t see Xbox Game Pass as profitable). Still, Phil Spencer’s interview with Axios shows unbreakable optimism: “I’m always going to set those targets high. Game Pass is doing very well from a business perspective and a creative and engagement perspective. Hence, it continues to be, I think, a real differentiator for our platform and an enabler for creators and players. You could do the math on Game Pass. I guess you don’t know how many subscribers or how much each subscriber is paying. Still, you can make some reasonably informed decisions and just do the math on what we think Game Pass could eventually be–you could do that on any part of the business. But absolutely, Game Pass is sustainable.
I love to see it growing because I know what it does to people’s diversity of games and the games that we can fund to create. And I think that’s a very magical mix. But its growth is a part of Xbox. It’s not the only thing that’s growing in Xbox. It’s not the sole focus of the organization, and it, as a standalone thing, is very sustainable as it sits today, like just today. It’s sustainable. I know many people like to write; we’re burning cash right now for some future pot of gold at the end. No. Game Pass is very, very sustainable right now as it sits, and it continues to grow,” Spencer says. There is no official figure on the subscriber count, but a recent chat between Strauss Zelnick (Take-Two’s CEO) and Spencer hinted at 30 million.
Spencer also talked about NFTs: “What I’d say today on NFT, all up, is I think there’s a lot of speculation and experimentation that’s happening, and that some of the creative that I see today feels more exploitive than about entertainment. I don’t think it necessitates that every NFT game is exploitive. I just think we’re kind of in that journey of people figuring it out. And I can understand that early on, you see many things that probably are not things you want to have in your store. I think anything that we looked at in our storefront that we said is exploitive would be something that we would, you know, take action on. We don’t want that kind of content.” In other words, he’s not fond of non-fungible tokens, unlike Electronic Arts and Ubisoft (we previously mentioned this subject, too).
So Xbox Game Pass is doing nicely, and with the Ultimate tier, you can even play Xbox Series games from the cloud on your Xbox One.
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