A new Bloomberg report based on interviews with former Microsoft employees has offered more fuel for speculation about the continued viability of Game Pass, including Microsoft's own alleged estimate for how much sales revenue Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 lost by being on the subscription service.
Unlike Steam, which offers its own real-time metrics while also being monitored by third parties like SteamDB, Game Pass is a black box, with only periodic updates from Microsoft—or insider information like that obtained by Bloomberg—to offer an impression of the service's health. Microsoft says it is growing and popular, but Xbox has been on a steady drumbeat of mass layoffs and studio closures in recent years.
One of the employees speaking to Bloomberg cited the $300 million figure as an internal estimate. I've seen some skepticism about the figure, and a comparison to how publishers count every pirate download of a game as a missed sale when prosecuting pirates or commenting publicly on piracy's impact, but I don't think that quite maps on to what's going on here.
This is an internal estimate that was never meant to be public, and it casts a negative light on a flagship project at the company—the incentive when making this estimate was to be as accurate as possible. We don't know how Microsoft produced the figure, but it was presumably the result of fairly sophisticated projections.
Kotaku did some back of the napkin math showing that Game Pass would have required an influx of 15 million new Ultimate-tier subscribers for one month, or 1.25 million over a whole year (pre-price hike), to make up the difference of Black Ops 6's lost sales. Game Pass' overall subscriber count was 34 million in 2024, a figure Microsoft has not updated this year.
There's a kaleidoscopic variety of pricing tiers and subscription durations between those two extremes, and this is also all to just match the revenue Microsoft theoretically could have had selling the game normally, when the publisher would presumably like to see its flagship gaming endeavor result in stronger revenue than the old model.
Despite all of that, IGN reported at the time of Black Ops 6's release that it set a series sales record, as well as a record for new Game Pass subscriptions on a single day. As Bloomberg points out, however, the sales record was with 82% of full price sales of Black Ops 6 happening on PlayStation 5, despite this being Call of Duty's first release as a Microsoft-owned property.
With Microsoft keeping a tight lid on the full story of Game Pass' health, as well as what combined metric of Game Pass and retail numbers it uses to determine an individual game's success or failure, we largely have to extrapolate how things are doing based on the publisher's public actions.
Microsoft has been closing studios and raising prices, most notably on Game Pass itself this past week, which continues to leave me concerned for the health of the industry as a whole given the rapid consolidation of triple-A development under Microsoft and Sony in recent years. I stand by my assertion that we're all paying for Microsoft's big bet on Game Pass.
