Phil Spencer says Game Pass now has 34m "fully paid" subscribers

They occasionally do "get your first month for $1" promotions too. Might have said it that way to clarify not using those numbers too

probably a good way of indicating he's talking currently paying subs and not saying something like "we've had 34 million people sign up for a paid account" when half of them have cancelled since

Being in business where I've had to make metrics like this, yee, companies will frequently "forget" to leave things like that out. That's part of the reason daily users was replaced with daily active users.

He might mean gamepass ultimate instead of just pc or just console?

I think it's a great spot to be. Should be more than enough to be profitable if they need it to be and has ample room to grow given how large the gaming market is these days. If I was heading up the division responsible for game pass though I'd be working hard right now on forging a roadmap for how to expand into the mobile market. I think cloud gaming is an excellent way to deliver true gaming experiences to a crowd that today make do with seriously subpar experiences and extremely predatory monetization. Couple that with them making their own smartphone attached universal game controller and they will get filthy rich.

Idunno. Even as a subscriber to game pass, it still kind of worries me that we're speeding towards "you'll own nothing and be happy" territory with arms wide open. Of course you can still buy the games on game pass, but how long until you can't?

They recently rolled what used to be called Xbox Live into the service. This is actually really low numbers considering.

That's for fixing sure. I'm no shill for any company, but game pass is by far the most value-for-money subscription out there. Netflix is more expensive and doesn't give even half the entertainment value.

We'll see if the price doesn't get prohibitive over the next 5 years.

For sure! I once dual booted Windows on a Steam Deck just so I could get access to PC Gamepass and it was a miserable experience. The two top annoyances in Windows were:

• Having to install a 3rd party apps to get the controls to be recognized.

• The APU drivers weren't being maintained for new releases (maybe that's AMD/Valve's fault), so I couldn't boot a new release (at the time) like Cocoon.

You need to bump to ultimate level for access to the console version, but you can already set this up. It's not trivial though. Not sure I'd recommend it though.