Microsoft tends to be tight-lipped when it comes to providing any statistics about the economy of Xbox Game Pass. But it has recently shared that since the inception of the subscription service, it has “paid developers and publishers across Xbox hundreds of millions of dollars in Game Pass licensing fees.” That said, that number is still quite nebulous.
What the Xbox Game Pass figures mean, though vague
In a post on the official Xbox blog, Chris Charla, General Manager of Content Curation and Programs, wanted to reveal the success of the ID@Xbox program. He shares that since the program began nine years ago to incorporate indie developers onto Xbox platforms, “independent developers have earned more than $2.5 billion in royalties and total revenue generated by ID@Xbox partners on Xbox almost doubled over the last three years.”
Going further, he claims that many games on Xbox and other platforms “would not have existed without the support of Game Pass members.” He touts that the ID@Xbox program includes more than 4,600 developers from 94 countries, with 1,000 of them signing up in the last two years.
From feedback given by indie developers, Xbox began to open up when it came to cross-play features. He also frames the service as a means of getting more indie games discovered, as the average Xbox Game Pass owner “plays 30% more genres and plays 40% more games.”
At the same time, the figures presented in the blog are still vague about the details. It’s unclear what the revenue distribution looks like across all the games on Xbox Game Pass. Given that the service has 25 million subscribers and each subscriber conservatively pays $10/month, it should generate about $3 billion. How much of a cut Xbox gets from that revenue stream is also unclear, although Xbox executives like Phil Spencer say that the subscription service is “very, very sustainable” according to Axios.
In other news, the developers for Gran Turismo 7 promise to fix the game with numerous updates, and the next Tango Gameworks game will likely not be in the horror genre at all.
