Xbox Game Pass has reportedly lost millions of users since 2024
Game Pass subscribers are down to 30 million, according to reports
Xbox Game Pass has reportedly declined by 4 million users since Microsoft last shared subscriber numbers.
That’s according to both Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal, which claim that Game Pass currently has around 30 million subscribers, down from the 34 million that Microsoft last reported in 2024.
According to court documents published during its legal battle around the Activision Blizzard acquisition, Microsoft had expected Game Pass to have around 77 million subscribers by this point in its longterm strategy.
However, as acknowledged by Xbox’s new CEO, Asha Sharma, earlier this week, Game Pass has not grown at the pace Microsoft expected.
Announcing significant layoffs across the gaming division earlier this week, Sharma specifically highlighted Game Pass as an area that had underperformed.
“To grow, we bet on Game Pass, multi-platform, and a broader portfolio of content,” she said in a note to staff.
“While those businesses have created meaningful value, they did not grow at the pace we expected. As that happened, our core business weakened, and we added more teams, more investment, and more time, hoping for a better outcome.”
Price rise cost Game Pass ‘millions’ of subs
According to comments made by Xbox’s chief strategy officer Matthew Ball last month, the Xbox subscription service lost “millions” of subscribers following a price rise last year, which was partially reversed in April.
Alongside the price reductions, Microsoft confirmed that Call of Duty games would no longer launch day one into Game Pass – a surprising policy change for Microsoft, which paid $68.7 billion for Activision Blizzard in 2023 and fought a years-long legal battle over the future availability of the franchise.
2024’s Call of Duty, Black Ops 6, was the first to launch day-and-date on Xbox Game Pass. The series’ inclusion in the service appeared to impact premium sales of last year’s game, Black Ops 7, significantly, with launch sales down more than 60% in some markets.
According to a Bloomberg report, Xbox gave up “more than $300 million in sales” of Call of Duty on consoles and PCs last year, due to users playing the games on Game Pass instead.
