Xbox Spends "Over A Billion Dollars A Year" On Game Pass Titles

Keeping Xbox Game Pass topped up with games costs more than one billion dollars a year, according to Phil Spencer. This only accounts for the cost of getting third-party games on the service too, so funding the production of first-party titles makes the true Game Pass budget even higher.

This comes from a recent interview with Windows Central, in which Xbox boss Phil Spencer sheds some light on Microsoft's gaming plans for this console generation. Here, Spencer reveals that securing more games for Game Pass costs even more than many of us would expect, especially as the subscription service has come under fire this past year for getting fewer big releases than before.

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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," says Spencer, discussing how the service fits into Xbox's current plans. "What we see in Game Pass is a service that supports all kinds of games, from the biggest games, to the unknown indie games that you didn't know you would love until you played it."

Despite these high costs, Spencer says that Game Pass is "financially viable" and actively "makes money" for the company. This lines up with previous comments from Spencer, who said the service had become profitable last October. Even in a year that was much drier for Xbox - both in terms of third-party deals and first-party releases - it doesn't seem that this has changed, at least based on his comments in this interview.

Still, for all the money that Xbox has spent to get titles on the service, it couldn't secure one of the biggest successes of the year. Leaked court documents (related to Microsoft's case with the FTC) revealed that the company was only willing to spend $5 million on getting Baldur's Gate 3 on Game Pass. Not only did it not get the game in its library, it couldn't even get it on the console at launch. Due to issues with getting it to run on Xbox Series S, Baldur's Gate 3 isn't launching on a Microsoft platform until later this month. In fact, it only managed to secure a Baldur's Gate release when it agreed to let the devs remove local co-op from the Series S version, although it will still be present on Series X.

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