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Xbox One's Supercharged Game Pass Should Start Worrying Sony And Nintendo

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Today, Microsoft announced that it was expanding the Xbox Game Pass to also include brand new, Xbox-exclusive titles. As in, when Xbox One exclusives launch, Sea of Thieves, Crackdown 3, or future Halo or Gears games, they will also appear on day one in Xbox Game Pass.

The $10 a month service, which lets you download a large selection of Xbox games, not just stream them, was already a pretty attractive service, and one of the better software deals in gaming, given all that it offered. But adding in Microsoft exclusives to be available on launch day is a new level for the program, and a very big deal.

I can hear the jokes already, jokes I’m resisting making myself about Microsoft’s relatively non-existent exclusive roster the past couple years, but we’re heading into an era when that narrative might start to turn around. I’ve heard nothing but good things about Sea of Thieves, obviously new Halo, Gears and Forza games will be attractive, and Microsoft has reportedly expressed interest in pursuing a Sony-like strategy of big single-player games, starting with Fable 4 coming sometime in the future.

By including these exclusive in Xbox Game Pass, it’s clear to me that Microsoft is slowly building something that Sony and Nintendo might want to be concerned about. This is the framework of a true Gaming Netflix, something that many services have tried to claim for years now, but Xbox Game Pass is the first one where the comparison feels accurate.

And right now, the simple fact is that Sony and Nintendo can’t really follow down this road. Both companies have exclusives that are so valuable to their consoles that they wouldn’t dare put them in some sort of subscription bundle like this and risk losing launch sales. Nintendo doesn’t even have the framework for a service like this set-up, forever behind the times with features like that, while it seems incredibly unlikely Sony would ever throw up God of War 4 or The Last of Us 2 onto PlayStation Now at launch because A) they want those millions of $60 sales and B) with story-driven games, they could be beaten extremely quickly and tossed aside, unlike games that players might keep coming back to after they were eventually removed from a Game Pass-like service.

Rare

Microsoft…doesn’t care. Yes, they like their exclusives and need to continue developing better ones than what we’ve seen lately, but they’ve already shown a willingness to let these games be flexible, first by granting players a PC copy of the game with every console purchase (and vice versa) with Play Anywhere, and now by adding them to the $10 game pass at launch. Combine an incredibly attractive software service like Game Pass with now best-in-industry hardware in the Xbox One X, and the only missing piece is the caliber of exclusives that Nintendo and Sony have in their arsenal. No small order, but the point is, you can see how Microsoft is setting the stage for a comeback (albeit a few years late).

What I’m wondering is if Microsoft could do something truly crazy, and strike up a big deal with EA or Activision or Take Two or Ubisoft and pay someone a truckload of money (the kind of money that only Microsoft has) to ensure that something like Red Dead 2 or Far Cry 5, etc. could also show up on launch day as part of Game Pass. That may be a stretch, but if anyone has the ability to ink a deal like that, it’s probably going to be Microsoft. But even without it, between older games coming to the service and newer Xbox exclusives, not only is Game Pass a must-have on Xbox One now, but it might even be a reason to pick the console over its rivals by itself. There really just isn’t anything that compares to it on PS4 or Switch.

While I am notoriously hard on Microsoft and the Xbox One ever since the married-to-Kinect days, I have been consistently impressed with both Xbox Game Pass and my new Xbox One X to the point where it’s slowly becoming my main console of choice outside of the must-play exclusives on other systems. If Microsoft can attract even more publishers to Game Pass, and start making exclusives on par with their rivals, we may be about to head into a very different era indeed.

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