Last year, Microsoft and Xbox waved when they announced some pretty sweeping changes to their popular Game Pass subscription service, ditching the Core and Standard tiers in favor of Essential and Premium, along with a $10 price hike for the Ultimate tier, moving the monthly cost from $19.99 to $29.99.
“It's all part of our commitment to meeting players where they are, so you can choose the benefits that work best for you, no matter how or where you like to play,” the company said at the time.
The future of Xbox hangs in the balance after Phil Spencer retires
Microsoft is making big changes to the Xbox brand, and few of them sound good.
Now, less than a year later, a whole new tier of Game Pass could be coming to Xbox gamers that would emphasize first-party releases and only those releases.
A first-party-only game pass level could be attractive to certain subsets of players
As first reported by Windows Central, “Triton” is the working name of a new Xbox Game Pass tier that would focus exclusively on first-party titles under Microsoft's umbrella.
Right now, it's unclear how much this future program would run on a monthly and yearly basis, but the offerings are firmly rooted in exclusives that people would want to access without the added cost of third-party releases and indie releases.
The rumored title list is as follows:
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Doom Eternal
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Dishonored 2
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Fake anniversary
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Fallout 4
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Fallout 76
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Gears 5
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Halo 5: Guardians
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Halo Wars 2
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Hellblade
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The Ori and the Blind Forest
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State of decomposition 2
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The Elder Scrolls Online
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Doom 64
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Psychonauts
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A retro classic
As you can tell, these are all first-party games, either owned by Microsoft after their many acquisitions, or lit by the company and subsequently released. What you don't see are Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 or Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, titles that either debuted on Game Pass or were added after launch.
If it comes to fruition, it could be the next move for new Xbox CEO Ash Sharma. As Windows Central previously reported, Sharma is “considering ways to make future consoles and products like Game Pass more attractive to a wider range of customers,” which could include lowering prices, but could also revolve around adding or meeting players where they are.
In this case: you want to play an Xbox exclusive.
Ultimately, the biggest hurdle to clear would be cost. That, and whether expensive exclusives like Call of Duty would also debut on the service as a day-and-date title or in a series. It was previously reported that COD on Game Pass cost Microsoft $300 million in lost revenue, so there are many factors that can affect what kinds of games are added and when.
- Number of devices simultaneously
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Five, with friends and family (in limited countries)
- Number of accounts
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1 Primary account holder
Does Crimson Desert make anyone else want to play Skyrim again?
I had so much fun in Crimson Desert, but after almost 200 hours it's time to revisit the old world.
