Over the last few years, Microsoft has pushed their Xbox Game Pass service to the forefront. The service is now clearly their biggest focus and their subscription base has grown to over 18 million subscribers. Lots of companies have been brought into the fold as well, including Sega, who seems to be quite happy with the service.
A lot of Sega content has been added to Game Pass, with maybe the most notable ones being almost the entire Yakuza franchise. In an interview with Eurogamer, SEGA Europe’s Senior Vice President Anna Downing said the company was “really happy” with Xbox Game Pass. According to her, the service has helped give a new exposure to their titles to the first party Xbox audience. She specifically pointed to Two Point Hospital, which had success she attributes in part to it being on Game Pass.
“[It] helped propel the franchise to over 3 million players worldwide. That’s a huge benefit of being on Game Pass, it strengthens the exposure you get to a huge first-party audience… That surge in engagement in turn helps to further establish your product in the marketplace. It’s great for us and it’s great for consumers who get to experience something they may not have engaged with outside of the Game Pass model.”
While Sega has put a lot on Game Pass, there is still quite a lot of the catalog they haven’t. For instance, they own Atlus, and none of their titles have appeared on a Xbox platform in a good while, much less Game Pass itself. Since it seems Sega is pretty happy with the service, at least on the European side of things, hopefully that means there is more to come.
