Microsoft's whole plan with Game Pass was that by buying up half the industry they'd get enough subscribers to justify the massive expense of buying and funding all those studios, but subscriber growth went flat far sooner than they expected. It's bad enough that Microsoft hasn't updated the official subscriber figures since 2024, but from a former Game Pass manager's figures on LinkedIn it's only grown from 34 million subscribers in 2024 to 35 million this year. I imagine this new free plan is a ploy to increase the number of subscribers they can report so Game Pass looks like less of a disaster. To compare, there's at least 10 million fewer Game Pass subscribers now than there were Xbox Live subscribers in 2015 (48 million). This is a fair comparison to make because Xbox Live got rolled into Game Pass a couple years ago (called Game Pass Core) as part of a previous attempt to juice the Game Pass subscriber numbers.

For one example of how Game Pass affects game sales, Microsoft internally estimated they lost $300 million in sales of Call of Duty Black Ops 6, the first Call of Duty game they published after buying Activision, due to Game Pass (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-03/xbox-s-ga...). They would have needed 15 million new subscribers for 1 month, or 1.25 million subscribers for 1 year, to make up the difference in lost sales. I don't think it's any wonder that we're seeing Microsoft hike the price on Game Pass and lay off thousands of game developers. I just wish they'd thought through all this beforehand so we could have avoided messing up all these people's livelihoods for what is a fundamentally bad idea (selling $60-70 games on a $15-$20 subscription).