A common refrain when Xbox Game Pass first began was that it was trying to be the first real Netflix of video games, a one-stop shop for a huge library of titles, and when new, big games debuted, they’d be offered for free on the service, rather than sold separately. Exactly the Netflix model.
The last time we had subscriber numbers revealed from Microsoft was in January of 2022, 25 million. Between now and then, you’d imagine we’d at least be approaching 30 million, or gone past it, even if Microsoft hadn’t announced that mark.
While that is barely 10% of Netflix’s 238.29 million subscribers, Xbox Game Pass is starting to surpass some of the lower tier streaming services.
It appears Xbox Game Pass may have more subscribers than both Apple TV+ and NBC’s Peacock. The second quarter of 2023 revealed that Peacock had 24 million paid subscribers. Apple TV+ is a little more tricky, as they don’t reveal specific subscriber numbers. Apple recently said that 1 billion people subscribe to its overall services, which includes things like Apple Music, iCloud and Apple Care. But third party estimates put Apple TV+ numbers are closer to 25 million, meaning that by now, Xbox Game Pass should have passed that.
I find it rather wild that Apple TV+ doesn’t have more subscribers, as its “hit rate” is much higher than other services, even if they have less shows overall. Ted Lasso gets all the headlines, but Shrinking, Foundation, Silo, For All Mankind, Hijack, The Afterparty and Physical are all excellent, and often overlooked because well, only 25 million people subscribe to it.
This also reinforces the strength of Xbox Game Pass, that it’s managed to creep past a service run by a nearly $3 trillion company, and another one from one of the oldest broadcast networks in existence. That’s not nothing.
If we expand this to Xbox Live overall we get 120 million, and Sony’s PS Plus has 47 million subscribers. Though those services, mainly for getting online to play multiplayer games, are not quite in the same category as Game Pass, its vast library and its day one mega-launches. PS Plus has the library, but it won’t forgo the sales of big exclusive launches.
The main worrying thing about Xbox Game Pass is how little Microsoft has talked about its subscriber count in almost two years now. Subscriptions exploded during the pandemic, but Microsoft’s silence indicates they may have slowed significantly. But that’s the bad news, and the good news is that Microsoft is about to head into a period with a bunch of very high profile exclusive releases on Game Pass, starting with Starfield, and they could end up with Call of Duty as a Game Pass draw in a couple years after the Activision deal finalizes and current Sony deals expire. We’ll have to see.
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