Xbox CEO: Game Pass is not very loss-making to increase price later

Phil Spencer, the head of Microsoft’s Xbox division, says his company isn’t irresponsibly spending huge amounts of money to increase the number of Xbox Game Pass users, only to increase the price of the service at a later date. .

Partly because Microsoft has not yet provided exact data about Xbox Game Pass, the website Stevior asked whether the service is viable. In response, Spencer indicates that the Game Pass is doing well. According to him, the business of the service has more than doubled in size on an annual basis and is on ‘a good track’, although this time again he does not give exact numbers about, for example, the number of subscribers.

Spencer denies the claim that Microsoft would make significant losses by investing heavily in the game service, only to suddenly increase prices at a later time. “For us, there is no such model. We feel good in the business we do now. We are investing in it, of course, but we are not investing in it in a way that is unsustainable.” In addition, he states that the offers or deals are quite normal as promotional activities, as many other services do.

The Xbox Game Pass gives users access to a catalog of roughly 235 games, including Microsoft titles, but also a number of major games from other publishers for 10 euros per month. Since the summer of last year, part of the catalog as beta has also been accessible to PC players. In fact, for roughly the cost of two new titles, subscribers can play all games in the catalog for a year, raising the question of how sustainable that model actually is for Microsoft.