Xbox Game Pass Tops 34 Million Subscribers, Diablo IV Headed to Game Pass on March 28 - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 15 February 2024 / 5,415 Views
Xbox has announced Xbox Game Pass has surpassed 34 million subscribers and Activision Blizzard games will start releasing soon on Xbox Game Pass.
The first Activision Blizzard game to release on Xbox Game Pass will be Diablo IV on March 28.
"There will be even more to play as we begin to fulfill our commitment to offer Activision and Blizzard games with Game Pass, both new releases and classic games from its legendary catalog," reads an Xbox Wire Post.
"We’re happy to share that Diablo IV will be available to play by the 34 million Game Pass subscribers on both PC and Xbox consoles beginning March 28! This is only the start of Xbox players being able to enjoy Activision and Blizzard games on Game Pass – we look forward to sharing more soon."
guess who 🥀
— Xbox Game Pass (@XboxGamePass) February 15, 2024
Diablo IV is coming March 28. Hail Lilith. pic.twitter.com/wxKLobiYT2
Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer in an interview with Game File (via VideoGamesChronicle) revealed the 34 million subscribers are "fully paid" and don't include "promotional players."
Spencer added the number of people who had Xbox Live Gold, but not Game Pass was a "pretty small number. The growth has more to do with PC and the cloud rather than the rebranding of Xbox Live Gold to Game pass Core.
"When there's a fixed number of console players on the planet you're not going to grow Game Pass forever by shipping just on consoles," said Spencer. "So we're seeing really significant growth on PC, which is great, and cloud."
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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Booty's pretty definitive "All of our games will go into Game Pass on day one" seems to flat out say that CoD will in fact be on Game Pass at launch. There was some skepticism on whether or not that would be the case.
Don't care about CoD at all but that would be a pretty massive boost to GP.
Lets see if the next CoD sales data is impacted. I'm assumeing atleast some of those already subbed Gamepass users, are CoD fans (since xbox is known as the shooter box), and would previously have bought said game. If this next time, its suddenly selling alot less, that will be down to gamepass.
I've updated the article with an interview from Phil Spencer with Game File stating the 34 million subscribers are "fully paid" and don't include "promotional players." Plus the growth has more to do with PC and the cloud rather than the rebranding of Xbox Live Gold to Game pass Core. Not many people had Xbox Live Gold, but not Game Pass.
They are still fully paid tho. So it is still 34m paying users. Yes growth is def. Not that big but I think it is expected at this point. It will go slower and slower.
They were paying customers when it was xblg. There's no additional payment for Core that I can see.
So what's the change besides saying that GP numbers are bigger?
If we're seeing these core members upgrade, then sure that's a benefit.
Otherwise, the revenue they got from xblg and GP separated is still the same with both combined.
Im not saying anything different, and I said that the growth is not that big. But they still have 35m users and that’s very good no matter what and it is still growing even if slowly . Not sure what your response’s point is….
I misread what you wrote, that's on me. Sorry.
Actually from some reports seems like it could even have 1 to 2M drop (possibly from people that have both Gold and GP).
That would actually make sense. I mean again the total is what's important but yes, people having Xbox Live Gold and standard GamePass probably did that, so the drop makes sense.
Some have it for less than $10 a month due to deals, some have it at $15 a month, so let's just split that down the middle to $10 a month. That's $340,000,000 in monthly revenue or $4.08 billion in annual revenue from Gamepass.
Edit - Since the fully paid comment by Phil, I'm adjusting these to be between $11-17 now, so we will split difference at 13 to be conservative. That's a minimum of $442 million a month and $5.3 billion a year.
yah... They are making some gold out of this :D
Looking forward to that with COD i might give game pass a chance again.
A lot of subscribers exist because they converted Gold and/or purchased up to 3 years Gamepass in advance when it was at a cheaper price. Others, even in Western nations purchase their gamepass credits from cheap international destinations, such as Turkey, Brazil and India where the monthly cost is only a few dollars, not $10USD. As such $10USD per account is likely much closer to the truth than a higher number, and it may even be below that.
That definitely happens, but I doubt that it's "a lot". Most people don't have the time or inclination to jump through hoops to save a few dollars a month. My bet is it is a small percentage of subscribers.
Even smaller are people like me who pay nothing, using Microsoft Rewards to renew. :)
In Brazil Eneba, account sharing, etc is a big plague =p
While 4 Billion is nice, we need to consider all the costs involved to bring third party games for it, the costs of development of first party games and the sales they are "losing" for not having all these people properly buying the games as before. I still dont think the math here is good for microsoft. Maybe when they reach 100M subscribers.
Actually... if high profile AAA games cost about 500M$ right now (which seems to be the case for the most expensive ones), and you release 3 of them each year, that is 1.5 billion $. Take another 500M$ for smaller titles (Grounded, HiFi-Rush and so on) and you have a full first party development covered by 2 billion. Another billion for 3rd-party and you get Gamepass up and running, have fully financed your first-party devs and that isn't even accounting for sales of these games outside of Gamepass. With number like these Gamepass is indeed sustainable.
Microsoft is a company that is valued at over $3 trillion dollars.
...And they have been undone by a forum members math.
The point of subscription services isn't to have the most revenue, it's to lock users into an ecosystem and then use the tactic of "upselling" to garner additional revenue.
Sub services are the easiest to leave. Locked store fronts and digital ownerships are the hardest.
What they want is games exclusive and locked to GP to feel locked into an ecosystem, at the moment, they don't offer that. This is why many people stick to Steam for much of their game purchases, because they already have loads on there so they continue on. GP is just rental, who cares if you sub one month then not the next, you never owned the game anyway so aren't locked in.
Probably cheaper here just to buy the games versus make them
Though.
the goal of game pass is to get to 10 billion per year and max out your subscriber growth
then like Netflix price hike it to double profit
lol the number of market experts coming up with what is the goal of GamePass on internet forums are frightening some time :)
i'm just saying they are doing what Netflix did, growth, then raise prices when you saturate the market
simple stuff here, silly
agree, hence why I said math is not looking good. I believe they need to reach a much higher number of subscribers to match all the investment made on buying studios and paying for games to come over to game pass.
but once they do it then things get much better, eventually they may be able to rely only on first party games and avoiding having to spend with third party, also other revenue streams opens up once you have such a huge number of subscribers. People get "used" to your service which helps when others release something alike.
but again, for that, I believe they would need to reach a much larger number of subscribers.
Xbox has now said not coming to iPhone not coming to PS
they are not concerned about game pass, it is no longer their only focus
straight from Phil's mouth, so yeah, game pass "failed" to dominate and it will just stay where it is, a PART of the business
that's why more third parties are coming
Yes pricing does change what the final profit number is going to be. Case in point steam game prices vary by country.
It’s still “nearly $1b a quarter” according to financial releases last year so you don’t really need to do calculations.
And taking in mind the "over 1 billion spent in third parties" the whole thing is lackluster to say the least.
I believe the $1B spent on third parties is for an entire year, while it generates around $4B per year in revenue.
Yep.
Phil said its around15% of revenue end of 2022
so around $2.2 billion. They were at 25 million subs by Jan of that year. Lowballing it, say they only reached 28 million by years end. So only an extra say 7-8 million subs but they nearly double their total revenue? Something wildly off with those figures.
It's confirmed that the 11.7 million Xbox LIVE Gold users were added to GP Core and it's accounted for the 34 million figure so you might wanna lower that estimate.
$5billion - man that is a laughable figure. Hell it's going to take them about 12years of total GP revenue (before you strip out the costs) just to cover the cost of ABK.....and within 12years gaming like we know it will be a completely different beast. There is only 1 thing that I can guarentee we will be doing gaming wise in 12 years and that's playing GTA6 on its 3rd or 4th release.
Thats not how it works, ABK is an asset, they do not need to "recover" the investment. It is an asset that already produces profits with or without xbox. Which cna be sold for other companies in the future if they decide to do it. What they look for is "how much is my profitability and return over this asset I just bought". And of course how it can generate synergies with other microsoft products to boos the company revenue/profits.
Well until mid life of Switch I'm pretty sure PS had higher profit than Nintendo (maybe not higher margin though).
FYI, Gamepass Core members are included in this number.
That's pretty obvious... Why would they (or would we) not include them? It makes no sense
It does mean the 25m number and this number are not using the same criteria though, so can’t be directly compared
Am i the onely one that misses xbox live gold for some reason.
Yikes! That growth is slooooooowwww... maybe 50M in what? Next 10yrs?
All ABK games are about to hit Gamepass, including CoD 2024 day one. Growth will definitely see a significant uptick from day one CoD releases.
Mabey 150 million with doubling of population and more gamers playing mobile. And I am thinking games pass is going more mobile with cloud gaming.
A year after makes sense. This should be what they are doing anyway, there is no profit on making big budget games and releasing them for $15, sub service or not.
I hope GP subs get a free battle pass too (something that shouldn't even be in D4 but still).
Diablo 4 is an alright game and surprised by teh number of people that are into game pass
Hum... above my expectations.
Why? Sum previously reported GP with Gold numbers were higher than 34M (almost 2 years ago), so why would you expect lower GP total than this?
Those are some pretty solid GP numbers! And I'm stoked to get a chance to play D4!
Bombshell announcement
Been saying for years that Subscription services are profitable. Sony is fully lying when they say it isn't viable for 1st party.
The biggest reason that Gamepass isn't way bigger is simply because Xbox has totally failed bringing a seriously big game to Gamepass due to their incompetence. When big desirable big games day 1-7 release on Gamepass only then will we see how successful that intended model will be.
its not viable for Sony because their AAA budgets are insane, 200 million isn't the norm right now for most AAA studios and Sony's budgets are now starting to exceed 300 million with a 5-6 year dev time which is over half of an entire console generation.
Halo: Infinite was most likely $500m and Starfield almost certainly over $200m at the very least.
It is not viable to have it day 1, not to that it isn't viable at all. It is just number crushing. Sony have close to 50M subs while xbox have about 34M subs, sales of the titles launched on GP lose a lot of sales of their 1st party, Sony doesn't. That is added money.
That's just sad. It's likely to be cramped in 2022 and 2023 completely flat.
When all Call of Duty hits GamePass it will have 50 million subscribers. The era of exclusives is over soon, Nintendo will put its games on Steam. PC Master race
haha this will never happen :) And if it does, I, for one, will still be buying the Nintendo console to play them anyway :D
Hmm mabey in twenty years
No need, just use yuzu! But yeah officially would be nice.
