Game Pass’s “only (outside) shot” for sustainability is to get GTA 6 or Call of Duty, says former Microsoft senior PR lead

Xbox under pressure “to cut expenses to the bone”

“This system was fine for a while when Game Pass was growing like gangbusters, but now it’s slowed way down and the amount of revenue it’s attributing to games isn’t keeping up with the budgets to make them.”

Hilderbrand comments that Xbox “was basically a rounding error on Microsoft’s books” in the past. “Then Xbox went on a buying spree and spent a lot of money on Bethesda, but orders of magnitude more on Activision,” he writes. “Now, the Eye of Sauron has turned, and Xbox is expected to start making that $70B back, or at least cut expenses to the bone (and then some) while they try.”

Hilderbrand’s post has sprouted a thread of industry comms and producer-level people sharing their own thoughts. There’s one from Douglass Perry, IGN co-founder, about the likelihood of Call Of Duty turfing up on Game Pass, to which Hilderbrand responds: “it definitely seems like a non-starter, but there’s also a constant pressure for Game Pass to be the killer app that you simply can’t live without”, adding that an additional pressure on the service is that “budgets for games keep expanding”.

“The only (outside) shot, is to put all the world’s biggest games on the service and make it an absolute must-have in the eyes of players. Minecraft is there already, Fortnite is there but it’s F2P so you’re not really adding value, the only things left are COD or GTA VI. No chance GTA goes to Game Pass, and I think with COD you’re doing the same math and basically saying it’s too much of a risk to give up the guaranteed sales revenue for the hope of driving enough Game Pass subs.”

Hilderbrand thinks Call of Duty’s future is assured, whatever the outcome. “COD will be fine though, as will the other mega-studios with huge IPs,” he concludes in his original post. “But you’re seeing the impact; all those smaller studios making really interesting games are going to fall away, simply because as good as games likeHi-Fi Rushare, they’re never going to make enough money to make up that $70B hole that Xbox now has to dig itself out of.”