Xbox Has Made the 'Largest Investment in Game Pass to Date' This Year - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 22 September 2025 / 6,529 Views
ID@Xbox boss Chris Charla in an interview with Eurogamer revealed Xbox has made the "largest investment in Game Pass to date" this year.
Xbox has signed deals with over 150 partners to expand the number of games on the subscription service and continues to engage with hundreds of partners every year.
"The majority of partners who've had a game in Game Pass want to bring their future titles to the service," said Charla. "As a result, we've signed deals with more than 150 partners to expand the catalogue. We continue to engage with hundreds of partners each year to review upcoming titles.
"Last year, we worked with over 50 teams to sign their first Game Pass deal. This year marks our largest investment in Game Pass to date, and we remain focused on delivering the most exciting and diverse catalogue in gaming."
Some of the notable third-party games that have released on Xbox Game Pass this year includes Hollow Knight: Silksong, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Atomfall, Balatro, FBC: Firebreak, and more.
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 follow the author on Bluesky.
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Get ready for another Game Pass price increase
Game Pass has been awesome this year thus far. I really can't say anything bad about the content it's recieved and what is still to come.
I think it's overall good, you end up playing some great games you might have no otherwise played. But you also end up playing some meh games, especially when they are expiring soon and you feel like you have top play it before it's gone.
That might just be you because I never felt the urge to play a game I am not interested in on GP because its expiring. I actually find myself with not enough time to play all the games that I want to play on the service lately than anything else.
I have never experienced an urge to play a game simply because it's expiring. I play games that look interesting to me, and that's it. If they don't grab me pretty quickly, I will stop playing them, unless I have significant reason to believe that the game is going to get better soon
And yet they do not seem to be moving the needle much, if at all, on console sales.
Ok yea this was the last number I remember.
Yes GamePass subs were pretty consistent at 22-25M subs for most of this entire gen with whatever gains MS would make on PC likely just covering losses from people jumping ship either from hardware or just signing up a month here and there and then bouncing off at times. Subs only increased to 34M last year because the September before that MS got rid of Xbox live gold and merged the 11.7M subs from that into GamePass with a 25 game gamepass entry teir(Core). Looking at it from that perspective the growth looks less organic and kind of like the service is just treading water since without that merger GamePass would be still around its January 2022 numbers. The 35M overall figure comes from a MS exec LinkedIn profile and the 37M figure is on Wikipedia but was never confirmed by MS, just other websites trying to do Math.
The handheld is a PC.
A portable PC. Some may only have this as their only gaming device. It helps the sub numbers to grow.
This is news that MS is giving more devs money? Okay then.
It's on MS as long as they manage them and fund projects. If they mismanage them so projects take too long, don't give newly formed studios a chance, stop funding 3rd party projects or let staff go to the point that certain studios aren't going to be making their main game anymore, then yes. I'm going to support the studios and employees at them over the mega corporation that made annual profits last year of 70billion.
Everything you just said MS did. So why is it wrong to cut those studios, 3rd party projects when they are not producing results. Its as if you do not know that making games is a business. A business with a lot of risk since you invest millions on a project hoping it will find enough success to at least recoup its cost. The studios games that were canceled were all games that were what we call development hell. As a person outside looking in, you have not real clue on their state but one thing is clear, if those games were at high quality and ready to release I highly doubt MS would cut them just because they already spent a lot of money on those games. Even now we are getting reports on Perfect Dark that shows that game after 7 years was still showing vertical slice.
One of them had 10 years to make a game but we had zero gameplay on it
10 years is a long time to support a studio that had nothing to show for..
That's why you are not a business cause a smart business person would keep the ones that are making good profit year and year out.
Arkane studios that had so many back to back failures . They had many chances to redeem themselves.
Same with studio who did hi fi rush great game but not a game that will sell in today's market.
Perfect dark studio.
They took so long to come up with idea. All they had to do was make a 007 type game.. this studio had years and years and some of the best talent in the industry..all they gave us was a small snippet teaser.
It was Rare, Rare made Sea of Thieves, one Xbox's recently most successful games. They are warranted a little leeway.
Don't hold MS responsible for Arkane's failures at all, that's on Bethesda and MS just inherited that. But Hi-Fi rush is fine, just shouldn't have been put on GP from the off.
But Initiative should have been given more time, considering they apparently had to restart in 2021 but they didn't take time to come up with the idea, they were setup to make Perfect Dark. Turn 10 will no longer be making Forza games, massive mistake in my view, and Contraband and Romero's game were cancelled, as MS just didn't want to fund them anymore it seems. Why they didn't pursue the MMO Bethesda's MMO team were making, I don't know.
Of course I'm not a business, I'm a person. ;-)
Here's the thing, MS in order to support GP properly cannot rely on paying off 3rd party devs for their games for day one (it's the same for Sony and their lackluster 1st party output over the last year, outside of one masterpiece). They need a strong first party lineup as an incentive to keep people interested, it's the same reason why all the TV streaming services try so hard to create their own content instead of just paying off TV and Film studios.
Perfect dark should have needed to be restarted. The problem with the initiative is that they were trying to make it complex. It should have been a simple 007 game with a female lead action game. If they did that they wouldn't have struggled.
Even when hi fi rush came to PlayStation and PC , very few bought it. Doubt it would have made any difference if it wasn't on gamepass.
Forza latest outing was pretty bad compared to other motorsport. There must be a reason for them going. I am guessing they lost alot of money since not many played it even on gamepass.
Not supporting all of their decisions as I would have loved to see contraband and Romero game but we need less mmo and live service games and more single player games!
So you just make me thinkg about on Hi-Fi Rush and much to the point of this original news article, MS spent money on third party devs, cash incentives, to get games on GP. 3rd party devs are compensated as best they can predict to how much revenue they might lose or to cover costs of development.
But Hi-Fi Rush, which was probably being made before MS bought Bethesda was then owned by MS and they just put it on GP, presumably, without the same kind of cash incentive. You might say, "Why would they, they owned the studio." and you'd be right but then how can they and the studio judge it's success without the same compensation 3rd parties are able to get?
Hi-Fi Rush could have been played by every GP sub but the studio closed and the game failed because if you judge the success based on the individual studio's success, then there isn't that extra wad of cash on the books.
This is entirely speculation however... anyway, lost the train of though.
Oh, agreed on the latter, we need gaming experiences not daily chores. Although, the MMO space is missing something recently, nothing big has come out in a while.
They have canceled games and fired devs. So yeah, doesn't seem like they are really invested in creating more value for Gamepass. All licensed content is temporary. First party content would truly add to the library. But Microsoft doesn't care.
Its current base of users seems decent but clearly they want more. Don't know how they make the leap to the 80+ million tho.
This is Microsoft's M.O. and has been for quite awhile. The first Xbox wanted to be Playstation. Window's Phone wanted to be iPhone. Surface Pro wanted to be iPad. Game Pass wants to be Steam etc.
It's been a long time since Microsoft lead the way in anything. Now, it's mostly about waiting for trends and then siphoning off as much money from them as they can until a new one pops up.
Nah. Sony, Amazon, and Google all entered the race too. Google had a false start and got disqualified right at the beginning. Sony and Amazon are still running though. They're just way, way behind MS.
They may be employing a different race strategy and choosing to stay behind them. But, they are in the race, and are way behind MS nonetheless.
They are all in on it now. Will the Netflix model for games work out in the long run? Sony is watching intently.
