Xbox’s Bright Future, and How We’ll Get There

Today, at Xbox Games Showcase and Starfield Direct, we showed the exciting future for players and game creators – dozens of new games, a new 1TB Series S console and new ways for players to get their games anywhere with PC Game Pass coming to NVIDIA GeForce NOW later this year. After our double feature, Head of Xbox, Phil Spencer, Head of Xbox Creator Experience, Sarah Bond, Head of Xbox Game Studios, Matt Booty, and Game Director at Bethesda Game Studios, Todd Howard also addressed the future of gaming at Microsoft in our What’s Next for Gaming event.

Players are discovering and playing games like never before – we have reached new records for monthly active users and monthly active devices, and just last quarter we saw a 46% increase year over year in people playing PC games on Game Pass. Game Pass continues to grow – our revenue from subscriptions overall reached nearly $1 billion last quarter.

We’re excited about the future of Xbox, and we see the opportunity to grow not only our own business, but the entire industry as a whole – through creating groundbreaking new games, inviting creators to build their dream projects on our platform, and opening gaming up to everyone, no matter where they are in the world. These are our key pillars to help continue that growth.

Xbox players, across all formats, will see new exclusives arrive more reliably

We know that players choose to play Xbox because of great content. Our ambition is to release at least four first-party games a year- although we’ll also balance that out with careful consideration for each project’s needs. That’s on top of the work our teams are doing to grow our existing communities that we’ve fostered over many years like The Elder Scrolls Online, Sea of Thieves, Minecraft, Forza, and so on. In the last five years, our teams across Xbox Game Studios and Bethesda have shipped 10 games with over 10 million players each life to date, from new IPs like Sea of Thieves and Grounded, to franchise entries like Minecraft Legends and Elder Scrolls Online. 

Our first-party games now have over 150 million monthly active users. We’re committed to investing in new franchises, taking risks, and creating the most diverse line-up of games from any company in the industry – and the likes of Fable, Clockwork Revolution, Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II and more represent the most ambitious line-up of games we’ve ever presented.

Of course, Starfield is one of these games. With a simultaneous release on Xbox Series X|S, PC, and Steam – with Game Pass day one on Xbox, PC and Cloud – it’s our belief that Starfield will become the most-played Bethesda Game Studios title, ever. Bethesda Game Studios has built on the Xbox development platform for a long time, and now that Bethesda is a part of the Xbox family, we’ve been able to support them more than ever – and it’s allowed the team to create the most ambitious game in the studio’s history, inside their first new universe for over 25 years.

We enable creators of all sizes

In today’s Showcase, we included [email protected] games like Dungeons of Hinterberg, a game from a husband-and-wife duo in Austria, whose debut title shared a Showcase with Starfield. With our support, we allow creators of all sizes to create the games they want to, at whatever scale they need.

To do that we offer multiple paths into the business, and multiple paths to success. Our indie program, [email protected], has now paid out over $4 billion to over 5,000 creators in over 100 countries. Our new Developer Acceleration Program is helping to bring new, less-heard voices into the space – we’ve already helped to fund projects from 30 underrepresented developers and are in contact with 250 more.

Game Pass offers a way to get games played by millions of members. One of Sarah Bond’s favorite notes coming out of the Showcase is that every one of the Game Pass titles featured this year comes from a creator that has previously released a game with Game Pass. We’ve also expanded PC Game pass to 46 more markets, bringing us to a total of 86, so game developers can reach millions of people in new countries.

There are currently more than 5,000 games in development for Xbox from developers across 100 countries – that’s more games in development from third parties than at any time in Xbox history. With this wellspring of games to come, our vision is to enable Xbox to offer the most diverse, easy-to-access line-up in the industry – you’re never far from finding your next favorite game.

We want to bring gaming everywhere

In today’s Showcase we showed Forza Motorsport, Starfield, South of Midnight, and more definitively next-gen games – titles that utilize the power of the Xbox Series X. Supply chain issues have now eased and we’ve been able to increase our supply globally making Xbox Series X easier to find than ever before, just in time for the line-up of exclusives we showed today to arrive.

We also offer the most affordable way into next-gen with the Xbox Series S, opening modern gaming up to more players than ever before. It’s a strategy that’s working – our data shows more than half of Series S buyers were new to the Xbox platform – and today we built on that strategy. We’ve heard your calls for more storage – with the new black Series S, we’ve introduced a version of the console with 1TB of space, perfect for those looking to build out a fuller library on their console. It will hit store shelves on September 1. We’ve also recently worked with our partners at WD and Seagate to bring down the price of our expandable storage and introduce more size options for our plug-and-play solution.

We’re also making the Xbox console experience even faster and more user-friendly, working on an all-new Home User Experience. After testing in our Insider program for several months, and continuously refining through Insider feedback and user research, we will be bringing a fresh look anchored on discoverability that will begin rolling out to all users in the coming months.

Today we shared that Game Pass members will soon be able to stream select PC games from the library through Nvidia GeForce NOW. This will enable the PC Game Pass catalog to be played on any device that GeForce NOW streams to, like low spec PCs, Macs, Chromebooks, mobile devices, TVs, and more, and we’ll be rolling this out in the months ahead. We’re excited by our future – to grow the industry, bring great new first-party titles every year, give partners more ways to deliver and access games and offer multiple ways to play all of them, wherever our players want to play. We are looking forward to going on this journey together with our community.