Last year, Microsoft and Xbox made waves when they announced some pretty sweeping changes to their popular Game Pass subscription service, ditching the Core and Standard tiers in favor of Essential and Premium, along with a $10 price hike to the Ultimate tier, which moved the monthly cost from $19.99 to $29.99.
“It's all part of our commitment to meet players where they are, so you can choose the benefits that work best for you, no matter how or where you love to play,” the company said at the time.
After Phil Spencer's retirement, the future of the Xbox hangs in the balance
Microsoft is making big changes to the Xbox brand, and few of them sound good.
Now, less than a year later, a whole new level of Game Pass could be on its way to Xbox players, one that would put the emphasis on first-party releases and only those releases.
A first-party-only card tier may attract certain subsets of players
As first reported by Windows Central, “Triton” is the working name of a new Xbox Game Pass Tier that would focus solely on the first-party titles Microsoft has under its umbrella.
Right now, it's unclear how much this potential program would run on a monthly and annual basis, but the offerings are firmly rooted in the exclusives that people would want to access without the added cost of third-party and indie releases.
The rumored list of titles is as follows:
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Doom Eternal
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Dishonored 2
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Fale anniversary
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Fallout 4
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Fallout 76
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Switches 5
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Halo 5: Guardians
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Halo Wars 2
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Hellblade
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Ori and the Blind Forest
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State of decay 2
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The Elder Scrolls Online
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Doom 64
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Psychonauts
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Retro classic
As you can tell, these are all first-party games, either owned by Microsoft after their many acquisitions, or greenlit by the company and then released. What you won't see are the likes of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 or Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, titles that either debuted on Game Pass or were added post-launch.
Should this come true, this could be yet another move by new Xbox boss Asha Sharma. As Windows Central previously reported, Sharma is considering ways to make future consoles and products like Game Pass more appealing to a wider range of customers, which could include price cuts, but could also revolve around add-ons or meeting players where they are.
In this case: want to play Xbox exclusives.
Cost ultimately would be the biggest barrier to clearing. That and whether expensive exclusives, like Call of Duty, would also debut on the service as a day-and-date title or later. It was previously reported that COD on Game Pass has cost Microsoft $300 million in lost sales, so there are many factors that can affect what kind of games are added and when.
- Number of devices at the same time
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Five, with friends and family (in limited countries)
- Number of accounts
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1 Primary account holder
Does Crimson Desert make anyone else want to play Skyrim again?
I've had so much fun in Crimson Desert, but after almost 200 hours it's time to return to the old world again.
