Xbox Game Pass subscriptions fall short of Microsoft targets
▼ Summary
– Game Pass subscribers dropped to 30 million, a loss of about 4 million from 2024 numbers.
– The 30 million figure is far below Microsoft’s goal of 77 million subscribers by July 2026.
– A nearly 50 percent price increase for Game Pass Ultimate, tied to including Call of Duty at launch, caused millions of subscribers to leave.
– Microsoft cut Game Pass price and removed new Call of Duty games from day-one availability in April to address the subscriber loss.
– Xbox CEO Asha Sharma cited Game Pass growth troubles as a reason for cutting 3,200 jobs from the Xbox division.
Xbox Game Pass subscriber numbers have slipped back to 30 million, according to a recent report from The Wall Street Journal. That marks a drop of roughly 4 million from the figures Microsoft publicly cited in 2024.
While the company no longer discloses exact subscription counts, the decline is significant for several reasons. Most notably, 30 million users falls far short of Microsoft’s internal target to hit roughly 77 million subscribers by July 2026. That goal came to light during the U. S. Federal Trade Commission’s investigation into Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard in 2023. A leaked slide also revealed an even more aggressive ambition: reaching 100 million paid Game Pass members by 2030.
Last year, Microsoft increased the price of Game Pass Ultimate by nearly 50 percent, while also reorganizing and renaming several service tiers. Though the company did not openly frame it that way at the time, the move was widely interpreted as the cost of bringing Call of Duty to the service on day one , the same day a new installment launched. That price hike, however, proved disastrous. Microsoft later acknowledged it triggered the loss of millions of subscribers.
In April, Microsoft tried to reverse course. It cut the price of Game Pass and removed new Call of Duty titles from the day-one lineup. Instead, those games now arrive on the service one year after their initial release. The change was among the first major decisions by new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma, who had previously flagged Game Pass’s declining membership and high cost in internal communications.
In a memo to staff this week announcing the layoff of 3,200 employees from the Xbox division, Sharma once again pointed to Game Pass’s growth struggles as a factor. She noted that the service “did not grow at the pace we expected.”
The Netflix-style game subscription model has drawn criticism from rival PlayStation, which has called it “value destructive.” Some developers have pushed back on that characterization. PlayStation also operates its own subscription service, PS Plus, though new games rarely debut there on day one. Instead, the service focuses on providing access to back catalog and classic titles.
(Source: Eurogamer.net)
