Microsoft has recently revealed how much revenue was generated by Xbox Game Pass on consoles alone. You might be surprised to see these numbers because they are quite big. It's been revealed that the game service offered by the company that brings Windows has reached over $2 billion USD in revenue across all of 2021.
If you want a more concrete figure, as noted by TweakTown, Xbox Game Pass generated $2.9 billion from consoles in 2021. According to data provided by Microsoft, Xbox gaming generated a total of $16.28 billion throughout the Calendar Year of 2021. In other words, Game Pass has generated roughly 18% of Microsoft's total yearly Xbox revenues and nearly 30% of its games and services revenues for the period.
It's worth highlighting that this is just revenue from the console sector alone. Tweaktown's Derek Strickland speculates that, between August 2021 and March 2022, Xbox Game Pass went from 15 million to 18 million subscribers. As such, a range of 15-18 million subscribers across both consoles and PC can be inferred. Of course, this isn't official data, so this is purely speculation.
Still, one can't deny that Xbox Game Pass has made a significant impact on the gaming industry. So much so that in this age of consolidation in the gaming industry, we have massive government entities concerned about the possibility of a monopoly caused by Game Pass as a service. Namely due to the Activision-Blizzard acquisition that Microsoft is trying to get approved.
Of course, the coolest thing about the service is how it has helped several people discover new games. Several developers have seen the benefits of working with the service and see a wide wave of popularity because of it. In fact, Chivalry 2 alone saw over 500,000 new players joining it since its launch on Game Pass. So, maybe there are some benefits to keeping this service relevant. Of course, that is up to our readers to decide.