Game Pass subscriber count drops to 30 million, well short of Microsoft's 77 million target

Game Pass has fallen back to 30 million paying subscribers, down 4 million from the 34 million Xbox publicly confirmed in early 2024. The figure comes from a Wall Street Journal report citing a person familiar with the matter — Microsoft itself stopped sharing subscriber numbers some time ago.

The gap between reality and ambition is stark. Internal Microsoft documents leaked during the 2023 FTC trial over the Activision Blizzard acquisition showed the company projected Game Pass would hit around 77 million subscribers by July 2026, with an even more ambitious internal target of 100 million by 2030. At 30 million, the service is less than half of where Microsoft expected to be. Xbox chief strategy officer Matthew Ball acknowledged earlier this year that the price hike cost the service millions of subscribers, and a Bloomberg report put the day-one launch of Black Ops 6 on Game Pass at roughly $300 million in lost revenue.

The slide that caused most of the damage was the decision to raise Game Pass Ultimate to $30 a month — a near-50% increase — timed around the launch of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 in late 2024. The game landed poorly with players, and the combination of a steep price hike and a disappointing release drove significant churn. New Xbox CEO Asha Sharma, who replaced Phil Spencer, moved quickly to reverse course: in April she cut Game Pass prices and pulled new Call of Duty titles from day-one availability, meaning they now join the service a year after launch instead. Sharma cited Game Pass growth troubles again this week in the internal memo announcing 3,200 Xbox job cuts, writing that the service "did not grow at the pace we expected."

Whether the price cuts and the removal of day-one Call of Duty can reverse the decline remains to be seen. The structural problem — that day-one blockbuster releases cannibalize full-price sales without driving enough new subscribers — hasn't gone away, it's just been sidestepped for now. Sony has long called the day-one subscription model "value destructive," and Microsoft's own numbers are starting to make that argument for them.