Phil Spencer Says Game Pass Is Already Profitable For Xbox

Game Pass has had its naysayers for some time now, especially Sony, which claims it wouldn’t be profitable to release its premium first-party games to PS Plus on day one like Xbox does with its own subscription service. Head of Xbox Phil Spencer now claims that Game Pass is profitable, accounting for 15 percent of Xbox’s content and services revenue.

As reported by The Verge, Phil Spencer confirmed at the Wall Street Journal Tech Live conference that the subscription service was finally turning a profit. It’s been known for years that Xbox was fine with losing money on Game Pass while it built up a solid subscriber base, and it seems that base is now here.

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Now that Game Pass is a solid chunk of Xbox’s revenue, Spencer says, “I don’t think it gets bigger than that. I think the overall revenue grows so 15 percent of a bigger number, but we don’t have this future where I think 50–70 percent of our revenue comes from subscriptions.”

Spencer also said that the company has seen “incredible growth” on PC Game Pass, but that console Game Pass has been slowing down. He isn’t concerned about this, however, as he puts it down to reaching almost everybody that wants to subscribe. Of course, the company is trying to entice more players by buying studios such as Bethesda and Activision Blizzard and launching more titles on Game Pass on day one.

Unfortunately for players, the price of Xbox consoles, games, and subscription services will be going up in the future. Spencer said, “We’ve held price on our console, we’ve held price on games and our subscription. I don’t think we’ll be able to do that forever.” For this holiday season, however, prices will remain unchanged.

In other Xbox news, Spencer also said at the WSJ Tech Live conference that Facebook’s Metaverse, Horizon Worlds, is a “poorly built video game.” Meta employees aren’t too hot on it either, calling it “sad” and “empty.”

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