Microsoft is no stranger to criticisms it often sees for its Game Pass service. Xbox president Sarah Bond has once again offered assurances that the subscription service has been quite profitable for Microsoft, and has been seeing a fair bit of growth as well. In an interview with Game Watch at Tokyo Game Show 2025, Bond spoke about the revenue that Game Pass has been generating, which hit a new record high of $5 billion in the previous fiscal year.
“Last fiscal year, Xbox Game Pass sales reached a record high of $5 billion,” said Bond (via machine translation). “It’s a profitable business, and as more creators join Xbox Game Pass, payments to creators increase, so we think it’s a good business for creators.”
Questions about Game Pass have gotten even more common in recent days thanks to Microsoft having unveiled its new tiered plan system for Game Pass across PC and Xbox at the start of the month. Through the new tier system, the price for a Game Pass Ultimate subscription has gone up to $30 per month. On the lower-priced tiers are new Game Pass Essential and Game Pass Premium offerings, which are priced at $10 a month and $15 a month respectively.
As you would expect from the new tiers, Game Pass Ultimate offers the most content, with more than 400 titles being playable. Along with this, Ultimate is also the only tier that offers Xbox and PC games on day one of their release. This also includes games published by Xbox itself. Essential and Premium, on the other hand, both have fewer games available.
Essential is advertised as featuring “50+ games” across PC, Xbox and Cloud, whereas Premium is advertised as featuring “200+ games”. The removal of first-party Xbox-published titles coming to the service on day one of their release has likely been a cause for concern for several Game Pass users that weren’t already planning on sticking to the Ultimate plan.
Back in July, The Game Business editor-in-chief Christopher Dring had spoken about the profitability of Game Pass as a service. After conversations with some sources at Xbox, Dring noted that the service has been profitable, even if the sales “lost” from first-party studios’ releases are taken into account.
As for whether or not Game Pass as a whole is good for the gaming industry at large, however, opinions seem mixed. In August, former PlayStation boss Shawn Layden spoke about the service, and how the question shouldn’t revolve around whether or not it has been profitable. Rather, he believes, questions should focus on whether or not the service is healthy for developers.
“They’re not creating value, putting it in the marketplace, hoping it explodes, and profit sharing, and overages, and all that nice stuff,” said Layden. “It’s just, ‘You pay me X dollars an hour, I built you a game, here, go put it on your servers’.”
“I don’t think it’s really inspiring for game developers.”
Former Bethesda executive Pete Hines has also spoken about Game Pass, saying last month that there needs to be a balance struck when it comes to the subscription service’s offerings, as well as the needs of the people providing the content for the service to succeed.
