Summary
Xbox Game Passhas helped keep modern single-player titles varied and viable, Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer said. This remark was offered as part of a recent interview that also saw the executive creditXbox Game Passfor helping some studios resist the live-service temptation.
June 1 will mark the eighth anniversary of Microsoft launching its Netflix-like gaming service. While the company no longer consistently reports its user growth figures, it occasionally shares other metrics, like when it recently said thatXbox Game Pass set a revenue recordduring the second quarter of its fiscal year 2025. And though everyone from shareholders to publishers have long been scrutinizing the service’s business model, Microsoft has consistently insisted that Xbox Game Pass isn’t just viable, but highly beneficial in multiple ways, some more obvious than others.
Phil Spencer highlighted one Xbox Game Pass benefit during arecent interview with XboxEra, which saw him credit the subscription service for keeping single-player titles viable—at least from Microsoft’s perspective. “Part of our reason for trying to get a subscription going was to allow us to also support games that have a beginning, middle, and end,” the executive explained. As part of this train of thought, the official also indirectly confirmed that Double Fine Productions' next project will be another single-player title.
Microsoft Wants to Offer More Than Just Live-Service Games
While Spencer acknowledged theindustry’s ongoing shift toward live-service games, he emphasized that he never wanted Microsoft to be entirely focused on such titles. “I didn’t want to see every game turn into some big service-based game,” he said, explaining part of the rationale behind launching Xbox Game Pass. These days, Spencer sees Microsoft’s subscription service as capable of highlighting smaller single-player experiences while also easing their reliance on sales, consequently making them more commercially viable.
Part of our reason for trying to get a subscription going was to allow us to also support games that have a beginning, middle, and end.
While Xbox Game Pass may be one of the ways in which Spencer is trying to champion single-player games and help studios resist the temptation to pursue live-service products, Microsoft’s own projects aren’t entirely free of sales expectations just because they help fill out its XGP content library. This was underlined by a series ofmid-2024 Xbox studio closures, which even included the developer ofHi-Fi Rush, a critically acclaimed rhythm game that Microsoft repeatedly insisted was a success relative to its budget.
