Game Pass is remaining an Xbox console exclusive (Picture: Microsoft)
Microsoft is not planning to bring Game Pass to Nintendo Switch or PS5, despite what a top exec seemed to imply recently.
Last week, Xbox’s chief financial officer Tim Stuart stated that Microsoft had undergone ‘a bit of a change of strategy’ and wanted to get its first party games and subscription services onto devices that were, ‘what we would have thought of as competitors in the past, like PlayStation and Nintendo.’
He never went into any detail though and considering Xbox boss Phil Spencer ruled out Game Pass on PlayStation 5 or Switch two years ago, it wasn’t clear if there’d suddenly been some new breakthrough or if Stuart’s understanding of the games industry wasn’t all that it could be.
A lot of Microsoft execs, outside of Spencer’s inner circle, don’t seem to understand the industry very well and so, in what seems to be an unofficial rebuttal of the comments, Spencer has insisted that, ‘We have no plans to bring Game Pass to PlayStation or Nintendo. It’s not in our plans.’
Spencer is the boss, but his comments are still the exact opposite of something another high-up exec had said only a few days prior, which makes it hard to know who to believe.
‘The thing I want to be focused on is how do we continue to innovate for people who’ve made the commitment to our hardware platform? And how do we continue to make sure that they feel great about their investment in what we’ve built?, Spencer told Windows Central.
Given we’re in the middle of the Christmas gift giving season there’s an additional incentive for Spencer to downplay the idea of Game Pass appearing on other consoles.
Back in 2021 he admitted, ‘We have no plans to bring it [Game Pass] to any other kind of closed platforms right now, mainly because those closed platforms don’t want something like Game Pass.’
That was before the Activision Blizzard acquisition, but since then there’s been no sign that anything has changed in the attitude of any of the three companies.
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‘We’ve put a lot of money into the market, over a billion dollars a year supporting third party games coming into Game Pass,’ said Spencer.
‘Game Pass was one of the things you know that over the last five years we built, and we continue to grow, it’s on PC, it’s on cloud. It’s an important part of the Xbox console identity. And I think it will continue to be that. And we will continue to look at future ways for us to innovate across our game portfolio and our platform.’
$1 billion may be pocket change to a company like Microsoft but that’s still a staggering amount of money. Although what would be more interesting to know is how many subscribers Game Pass has and whether it is profitable. As usual though, Spencer didn’t mention that.
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Microsoft is not planning to bring Game Pass to Nintendo Switch or PS5, despite what a top exec seemed to imply recently.