COMMENTARY - Despite their shift in focus, PC Game Pass in its current form is probably not long for this world

Say it ain’t so.

By Jonathan Garrett
23/10/25

Reasonable debate around the ongoing value proposition of subscription services, stagnating console sales, and clear evidence that folks aren’t necessarily migrating to current gen platforms have left the games industry in a particularly tumultuous position. Xbox in particular appears to bearing the brunt of this discourse, with some very public missteps and misreads of the terrain leading to skepticism around their future in hardware (despite the multi year commitment to AMD).

In spite of these challenges, there is a beacon of hope. Across various metrics, PC seems to be where the growth is. Steam player counts and engagement continue to smash records, with multiple titles both big and small finding success. After the recent Game Pass rebranding, and the inflated cost for Ultimate, we found ourselves dipping back a step into the more reasonably priced PC Game Pass equivalent. The Day 1 releases, excellent library and improving Xbox app experience are reasons enough to be cautiously optimistic.

That being said, given recent reports of profitability targets for Xbox sitting well above average, we wouldn’t be surprised if that lovely £13.49 PC Game Pass tier gets jacked up or disappears completely. It’s not even remotely surprising that Microsoft are mandating a faster return on investment, especially after the Activision Blizzard deal. Plus they’re a corporation in the business of making money. None of this should be news.

But if PC is where Xbox are seeing gains, and there’s talk of their next console taking something of a hybrid approach with PC feature integration, it wouldn’t be a huge leap of logic to surmise that they’ll want to extract as much revenue from that space as possible. They must know PC Game Pass is an outlier still offering fantastic value; even though it’s the only Game Pass tier that doesn’t include cloud streaming, the offering is undeniably strong (which might explain why they bury the tier information at the bottom of their website).

If this console generation has taught us anything, it’s that nothing is predictable anymore. There are no red lines when it comes to exclusives and ports. All three platforms have actually raised the cost of their consoles since launch. We can’t honestly say what this is going to look like moving forward. Safe bets are a thing of the past.