Xbox Game Pass: Microsoft missed its goal – Frandroid

Financial documents show Microsoft missed its June 2021 goal for Xbox Game Pass.

Xbox Game Pass has become the heart of Microsoft’s gaming strategy and for good reason, it is part of the annual objectives of Satya Nadella and several executives of the company. This is among other things what we learn in a financial document revealed today by the site Axios.

Around 20 million subscribers

Forget the false revelations attributed to the boss of Take-Two that you could have seen pass a few weeks ago, we now have a very precise estimate of the number of subscribers to Xbox Game Pass from Microsoft. Officially, the firm has refused to give any new figure since the 18 million subscribers of January 2021. The reason is simple, the numbers are not that good. Microsoft missed its growth target.

We can indeed see in the documentary a line ” Xbox Game Pass Subscribers ”With an objective of growth from one year to the next. From June 2019 to June 2020, Microsoft beat its growth target of 71% by growing the mass of subscribers by 85.75%. But the following year, from June 2020 to June 2021, the target was 47.79% and growth was only 37.48%.

According to Daniel Ahmad’s calculations, a renowned industry analyst, that would put the number of subscribers at around 20 million in June 2021.

All the lights were green

Of course, a 37% growth is indeed something positive for the service, but it is understandable why the objective was more important. The year 2020-2021 has been a year of all records for the video game industry due to the pandemic and the containment of the population. In addition, this period is also marked for Microsoft by the addition of the Bethesda Catalog to Xbox Game Pass, of EA Play service and flagship games from their launches like Outriders and MLB The Show.

A strategic end of the year

However, it must be admitted that the year 2020-2021 was not marked by significant releases at Microsoft from its internal studios, in particular due to the delay of Halo Infinite. aline-upof late arrival games that we noted during Xbox Series X review until early summer. Since then, Microsoft has launched a strong or internally developed title on its service every month: Flight Simulator, Psychonauts 2 or even recently Back 4 Blood marked the summer and the beginning of autumn.

The most important is yet to come for the Xbox team, as she recalled this week. By the end of the year, Microsoft is preparing to launch Age of Empires IV on PC, Halo Infinite and Forza Horizon 5, two flagship titles for console, cloud and PC by the end of the year . Not to mention the launch of Minecraft and its Caves & Cliffs extension, in Xbox Game Pass on PC.

This end of year period will necessarily be decisive in discovering the growth potential of the service.