Last year, Microsoft and Xbox made waves when it announced some rather sweeping changes to its popular Game Pass subscription service, doing away with Core and Standard tiers in favor of Essential and Premium, along with a $10 price hike to the Ultimate tier, shifting the monthly cost from $19.99 to $29.99.
“It’s all a part of our commitment to meet players where they are, so you can choose what perks work best for you, no matter how or where you love to play,” the company said at the time.
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Microsoft is making big changes to the Xbox brand, and few of them sound good.
Now, less than a year later, an entirely new tier of Game Pass could be on the way to Xbox gamers, one that would put an emphasis on first-party releases and only those releases.
A First-Party-Only Game Pass Tier Could Be Enticing To Certain Subsets Of Gamers
As first reported by Windows Central, “Triton” is the working name of a new Xbox Game Pass Tier that would solely focus on the first-party titles that Microsoft has under its umbrella.
Right now, it’s unclear how much this prospective program would run on a monthly and yearly basis, but the offerings are firmly rooted in the exclusives that people would want to access without the added costs from third-party and indie releases.
The rumored list of titles is as follows:
- Doom Eternal
- Dishonored 2
- Fale Anniversary
- Fallout 4
- Fallout 76
- Gears 5
- Halo 5: Guardians
- Halo Wars 2
- Hellblade
- Ori and the Blind Forest
- State of Decay 2
- The Elder Scrolls Online
- Doom 64
- Psychonauts
- Retro Classics
As you can tell, these are all first-party games, either owned by Microsoft following their many acquisitions, or greenlit by the company and subsequently released. What you don’t see is the likes of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 or Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, titles that have either debuted on Game Pass or were added after launch.
Should this come to fruition, this could be yet another move by new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma. As Windows Central previously reported, Sharma is “considering ways to make future consoles and products like Game Pass more enticing to a broader range of customers,” which could include price decreases, but also could revolve around additions or meeting gamers where they’re at.
In this case: wanting to play Xbox exclusives.
Cost ultimately, would be the biggest hurdle to clear. That and whether expensive exclusives, like Call of Duty, would also debut on the service as a day-and-date title or down the line. It had previously been reported that COD on Game Pass has cost Microsoft $300 million in lost sales, so there are a lot of factors that might impact the kinds of games added and when.
- Number of Devices Concurrently
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Five, with Friends & Family (in limited countries)
- Number of Accounts
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1 Primary Account Holder
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