It’s no secret that Xbox Game Pass has become central to all of Microsoft’s most important strategies going forward, and their ecosystem across Xbox and PC that is really going to rely on the subscription service to drawn in (and keep) consumers. And while one of the ways Microsoft will do that us by making sure their vast first party portfolio keeps pumping exclusive content into Game Pass, the company wants to increase the service’s value in other, more fundamental ways as well.
For instance, head of Xbox Phil Spencer wants players and consumers to be able to access Game Pass and the games in its catalog more quickly, and cut down on the downtime that is brought about things such as downloading or loading up games.
“We now have a generation where our customers have access to hundreds and hundreds of games in their portfolio and we’ve never really had that,” Spencer said while speaking with GameSpot. “[Previously] my portfolio of games is usually down to what discs do I happen to own right now and what games have I purchased digitally. But if you’re a Game Pass subscriber, you have access to hundreds of games and your friends list has access to that same shared library of games.”
“And we think that community opportunity–as we bring the community of our players together with a really creative community of developers [who are] building some immersive games and creative games that land on Game Pass–there’s some things that we wanted to work on to make it easy to try your next game,” Spencer continued.
“Download times are an issue, time to get into the game, load times, these things,” he added. “And when you have such a broad portfolio of games that you have on Game Pass and the community of people who are in Game Pass, where somebody might literally drop you a line on Xbox Live saying, ‘Hey, you should go try Minit, it’s a really cool game,’ we want you to be able to browse games the way you browse other forms of media.”
Cutting down on load times – and not just within games – is something both Sony and Microsoft are putting a lot of emphasis on with their respective next-gen consoles (SSDs have been a major talking point for both), so it’s not surprising to see Microsoft wanting to do that with something like Game Pass as well.
