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Xbox Game Pass currently has somewhere in the region of 21 million subscribers, not 30 million as was previously rumored.
$70 games are all well and good (well, not always) but the battle for console creators right now and heading into the future appears to be the strength of their subscription services. Xbox leads the way in that regard right now as there is no better video game subscription deal out there than Game Pass. A monthly fee for hundreds of games, including some pretty major titles as soon as they're released.
Take-Two's Strauss Zelnick recently said that Game Pass has somewhere in the region of 30 million subscribers. In fact, he said it directly to Xbox's Phil Spencer while the two of them were on a podcast together. Spencer neither confirmed nor denied the number, simply saying that the last official figure was 18 million.
That would be an incredibly impressive leap if true, but according to industry inside Jeff Grubb, it is not. “Zelnick picked a number out of the air. If it was 30 million for Game Pass, they would've said,” Grubb tweeted. Grubb added that the official number is just shy of 23 million, but Xbox now doesn't want to report that since it is so much lower than the 30 million figure put out into the world.
Grubb also said on Grubbsnax that Game Pass had somewhere in the region of 21 million subscribers around the time of E3 this year, so 23 million to close out the last quarter makes a lot of sense. A slight increase compared to June and a pretty big leap when compared to 18 million, the last official number. It would have taken a minor miracle for its subscriber base to have jumped up by nine million subscribers in the space of one quarter, though.
Game Pass is probably far from done when it comes to growth. People continue to snap up Series X and Series S consoles, and the service is only going to add more big titles as time goes on. Just this week it made Marvel's Avengers, including all of the free DLC released for the game so far, free to all subscribers. Halo Infinite will be available on Game Pass when it launches later this year, as will Starfield when it arrives in 2022.