Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass has become their crown jewel. Very clearly it is their biggest focus going forward, and you can’t deny that it doesn’t drown you in games (and they are only getting warmed up for this holiday season apparently). Like any service, it’s ever evolving, and one thing that could happen is it becoming branched to a multitude of other services down the road.
Speaking with GAMINGbible, Xbox General Manager of Marketing Aaron Greenberg talked about the openness of Microsoft to expand Game Pass. He touches on the recent partnership with EA, which allowed EA Play to be rolled into Xbox Game Pass Ultimate free of charge, and said they are open to similar things in the future. Though specifically, he’s talking more along the lines of add-ons: the ability to add other services to Game Pass potentially with some type of discount, and he’s thinking about more than just gaming.
“EA Play was its own standalone subscription service” he continued. ” Now, including that in Game Pass as a great value; I mean, we believe the best way is to continue to add more value to Game Pass. That’s our primary focus.
“But that doesn’t mean that we’re not against offering gamers choice. If there’s another subscription service they want to add on, we announced the partnership with Disney+, we’re giving 30 free days away of Disney+ to members, we’ve done stuff with Spotify and other subscription services. So we’re open to doing marketing partnerships and co-promoting those services because we know for many people, the best way to experience whether it’s games or other forms of entertainment, is to get kind of the all-you-can-eat plan at the one low monthly price”
There exists several high profile game subscription services, such as EA Play and uPlay+, but if you were to extend that to other non-gaming services, that’s a lot of potential. We see similar things like this all the time with other services, such as Hulu, for instance, that allows you to add-on various premium networks, sometimes at a discount. Microsoft is moving very much into the subscription service, so it’ll be interesting to see how it evolves.
