Game Pass was always good. Now, it’s finally consistent

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

The end of 2024 was a huge moment for Microsoft’s Game Pass subscription service. The day-one arrival of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, the biggest possible blockbuster to add, felt like the climactic endpoint of Microsoft’s $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard. And it was swiftly followed by another huge Microsoft release: Bethesda’s Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, an improbably great licensed romp starring a genuine pop culture icon.

The early months of 2025 haven’t seen such splashy day-one exclusives on Game Pass, and won’t until Doom: The Dark Ages arrives on May 15. And yet this period has been just as consequential for Game Pass; it has, if anything, done even more to demonstrate the value of a Game Pass subscription. The service is finally delivering something Microsoft has always intended it would: a steady, reliable stream of brand new games you actually want to play.

It started in January, with the surprise release of the Ninja Gaiden 2 Black remaster, the sleeper fantasy adventure Eternal Strands, and dependable Nazi assassination sim Sniper Elite Resistance. In February, there was Obsidian’s Avowed, perhaps the ultimate Game Pass release — a manageable, moreish, and colorful role-playing game. Now we have Atomfall, completing an endearingly janky one-two punch from Sniper Elite developer Rebellion. The pace is not about to let up. On April 8, there’s Compulsion Games’ South of Midnight. On April 24, the delightfully French turn-based RPG Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.

Amongst all these titles there have been a smattering of must-play indie games, like Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders, Citizen Sleeper 2, and the upcoming Blue Prince. There have also been some worthwhile back catalog drops of varying vintage, from the first Diablo, through Watch Dogs: Legion and Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader, to the now-ubiquitous Balatro.

These games are all great additions, but they are not the headline. What’s really striking when you look at this release schedule is the steady cadence of brand-new, mid-size, single-player adventures: the kind of game you can gorge yourself on for a couple of weeks and then move on, happy and satiated. From January through to Doom: The Dark Ages in May, Game Pass is serving up at least one of these games every month on day one — and sometimes two or three. It’s also notable that many of them — Eternal Strands, Avowed, Atomfall, South of Midnight, Clair Obscur — are originals. Rejoice, for in the year 2025, Game Pass has become a reliable monthly supplier of a kind of entertainment that was on the verge of extinction: original AA games.

With all those new COD and Indy subscribers hanging around, the timing could not have been better. Game Pass has long represented good value. Microsoft has kept the service’s catalog well stocked since its early days, and simply having access to every first-party game on day one — even before that lineup included Bethesda and Activision Blizzard titles — was always a compelling reason to subscribe. But the rate at which substantial new games would be added to the service was erratic, to say the least. Now, it’s a smooth conveyor belt. That success is just as attributable to smart partnerships with independent studios like Rebellion and smaller publishers like Clair Obscur’s Kepler Interactive as it is to Microsoft’s newfound publishing might.

There are a couple of important caveats to bear in mind. The first is that, since Microsoft rejigged the structure of Game Pass last year, this judgment only really applies to the Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass tiers, where day-one games live. Game Pass Ultimate isn’t cheap, but with EA Play and cloud gaming included, it’s still good value. PC Game Pass is a stone-cold bargain.

The second, much more significant caveat is: I have no idea if any of this is working out financially for Microsoft or for its partners. This has been true since the inception of Game Pass, and even more so since Microsoft stopped reporting subscriber numbers. The cost of rolling up all these day-one games in funding deals, internal licensing, and cannibalization of game sales, must be huge. And that’s before you even factor in the incalculable cost of the acquisition spree that saw Microsoft snap up studios like Avowed’s Obsidian Entertainment and South of Midnight’s Compulsion Games, not to mention the even pricier purchases of Bethesda and Activision Blizzard.

But if there was ever any doubt that Game Pass made sense for gamers — at least, gamers of the kind that like to play through a new single-player adventure every month — that doubt has now been dispelled. Game Pass is not just creating happy customers, it’s making a big contribution to keeping a rickety sector of the industry and artform of video games alive. Here’s hoping this is sustainable, and as good of a deal for the makers of these games as it is for the people playing them.