The topic of how much developers and publishers get to put their games on Xbox's Game Pass subscription has long been a hot topic in the gaming world, and we now may have a bit more insight after a recent Bloomberg report.
According to the report Microsoft now spends an eye popping 1 billion dollars to secure third party games for its service. The tech giant offers "flat fees of millions of dollars upfront” to add smaller titles to Game Pass from other publishers. Of course all games and therefore all deals are different, presumably paying much more for bigger titles and for titles that launch on the service rather than deals for older titles. There's also no word on if this spending includes things such as whatever fee they would pay EA to have EA access be included in Game Pass.
This is the first peek behind the curtain of Game Pass we've seen in awhile. Back in 2021 Phil Spencer told The Verge that deals are "all over the place" meaning who gets paid what and for how long. There's also cases such as Capcom's Kunitsu-Gami: Path Of The Goddess where it was recently revealed that Xbox helped fund the production of the game in exchange for a Game Pass deal. This is likely a fairly common occurrence as well as companies look for ways to recoup costs in a volatile market.
As Microsoft continues to tinker with its subscription model to find out what works best for both themselves and other publishers it's clear that Microsoft is heavily invested in making Game Pass work. The company has invested heavily in first party support with the purchases of many studios and publishers and with this new report, that includes third party support as well.
With Xbox set to have a showcase at next weeks Tokyo Game Show we likely won't have to wait much longer to see if any other third party games will be making their way to the service.
