Does Xbox Game Pass' yield play make sense?
Also: 'more like this', the big new Steam games of the week, and lots of discovery news.
[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert & company founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]
Well, we had to call an audible and not discuss Steam wishlist conversion today (it’s moved to next week, instead, allowing us to crunch even more numbers!) That’s due to those new Xbox Game Pass changes, which is big platform news, right?
Talking of console platforms, did you spot the new book from Sony and Read Only Memory celebrating 30 years of PlayStation with lots of hardware prototype goodness, including “never-before-seen consoles, controllers, and design studies”. (ROM has a lot of good books, including that poignant ‘history of the LAN party’ tome.)
[WANT LOTS MORE DATA? Companies, get much more ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data SaaS access org-wide via GameDiscoverCo Pro, as 80+ have. And signing up to GDCo Plus gets (like Pro!) the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus ‘just’ basic data & more. ]
Steam news: Silent Hill, Battlefield, Wolverine, hi…
OK, it’s the end of the week. So let’s try to get through all this wonderful game discovery & platform news before we go out raving in an empty room:
The latest Footprints.gg ‘trad media’ game coverage (sign up to their service, btw!) sees Silent Hill F (zooming to 1m copies sold!) first, followed by Battlefield 6, Borderlands 4, and two PlayStation-first games: Wolverine and Ghost Of Yotei.
As spotted by James Purell: “Roblox is shutting down Guilded at the end of 2025.
They acquired the Discord competitor in 2021 for $90M USD… [but it didn’t scale, so they] instead acquired a Discord bot in 2024 (Bloxlink) and partnered with Discord for Roblox account linking.”Here’s some harsh but notable feedback from T-Minus’ Rich Vogel, who’s been chasing funding: “I’ve spoken privately with several publishers, VCs, and developers from Asia and Europe, and they all see North American developers as expensive and entitled. This perception is unfortunate but reflects the reality we face today.”
After we reported on Tuesday that Steam’s Autumn Sale page had ditched the second, lower set of daily-featured 4x4 ‘discounted specials’, it seems to have… magically re-appeared? (Perhaps it was an inadvertent exclusion after redesigning the sale page? Either way, more ‘featured’ quarterly sale slots = good for everyone…)
Amazon’s done a notable reboot of cloud gaming service Luna, ditching the paid tiers and making it free and Prime-first. They’re also adding ‘GameNight’ party games like, uhh, “Courtroom Chaos: Starring Snoop Dogg,” (Announce here - the Prime Gaming brand is going away, tho free Twitch subs are still happening.)
A good example of the ‘skilled, but hobbyist’ dev we all compete with on Steam: “I released my first game with 3,000 wishlists. It grossed $20,000 in its first month… playtime: Median 1 hour 22 minutes, average 6 hours 40 minutes.” The game - an async roguelike autobattler - took ~3 years as a student/’full-time dayjob’ engineer.
Yrs Truly’s Gaming Content Creator Report 2025 interviewed 100+ creators (mainly from UK/Europe), and GI.biz summarizes: “Almost half of content creators work part-time.” Their biggest concern is their community’s reaction to sponsored content: “71% of respondents rated their concern as seven or higher out of ten.”
The folks at Newzoo chatted to PC Gamer on whether Gen Alpha will truly ‘graduate’ en masse from Roblox to Steam/console games: “There is a chance that they will stay in Roblox, because all their friends are still in Roblox, and there is this network effect [so] it’s difficult to go and play Call of Duty alone.” We’d agree.
Nintendo’s looking more at fast-growing South East Asia: “Nintendo Singapore’s creation aims to accelerate Nintendo’s business in the region… after [adding] Nintendo Taiwan (April) and Nintendo Stars (August). Nintendo is also considering establishing a subsidiary in Thailand… DK Bananza to support Thai language in a future update.”
Game Dev Reports highlighted some Roblox UGC revenue stats we didn’t sufficiently feature from RDC. From June 2024 to July 2025: “The top 1000 [Roblox] developers make an average of $980,000 per year. That’s 2.9 times more than in 2020… the top 100 earn about $7 million per year – a 2.8x increase compared to 2020.”
Microlinks: Epic’s launched its Web Shops for mobile and PC, “available worldwide for mobile games and governed by Apple and Google’s store steering rules in each territory”; Xbox Cloud Gaming comes out of beta with improved 1440p resolution; Apple “confronts the Vision Pro mistake by fully shifting focus to smart glasses.”
Does Xbox Game Pass’ yield play make sense?
We’re presuming you (and the neighbor’s cat, etc.) has heard about the changes to Xbox’s Game Pass program announced this week. If you haven’t, we’ll try to sum it up incredibly quickly:
The Game Pass Ultimate subscription (formerly $20/month) - which includes Day 1 access to first-party games - is increasing in price to $30/month, and adding Ubisoft+ Classics and the Fortnite Crew subscription.
The Game Pass Premium sub (staying at $15/month, formerly Game Pass Standard) includes more games, is playable on PC, and will have first-party Xbox games “within a year of their launch” (except Call Of Duty, apparently.)
The Game Pass Essential sub (staying at $10/month, formerly Game Pass Core) adds PC playability, but keeps the basic ‘online multiplayer on Xbox + 50 games to play’ functionality from before.
Otherwise, the subs get various cloud gaming options, and Ultimate subscribers “exclusively enjoy our best quality streaming and shortest wait times”, apparently. (Woo, tiers!) And PC Game Pass, the niche sub which includes Day 1 access to first-party games, is going up from $12/month to $16.50/month.
As you can see from this ‘history of Game Pass/Ultimate’ article, the original Ultimate package was $15/month in Jun 2019, and $17/month as recently as June 2024. So it’s true - if you just let your subscription ‘ride’ with auto-upgrade, that’s a 76% increase in less than 18 months. Hence plenty of Internet yelling. But here’s what we think:
What’s funny? If you view the current Game Pass tiers in isolation, with zero memory of the pitch/price of the last 5 years - or knowledge of PlayStation Plus’ current pricing - we think they are fairly reasonable. (Sadly, Xbox has not developed a Men In Black-style ‘Xbox mind wiper’ yet.)
The issue here is that it’s Xbox’s biggest fans who are shouldering the price increase. And a lot of those folks were invested in Phil Spencer’s ‘we can make it so everybody gets first-party games Day 1, and you don’t have to pay that much’ pitch. (Something Sony was saying didn’t make sense financially as early as 2020.)
Two contrasting results of this: a) many canceling their Ultimate sub would be happy with a lower tier plan, but are now feeling burnt b) while we hear about loud cancellations, there’s going to be a lot of subs who don’t notice, don’t care, or don’t get around to cancelling. Xbox will still come out ahead here, $-wise.
We’ve written extensively about the history of Game Pass. And this 2023 article on boosting GP adoption gets into some of the nitty-gritty of why, contextually, it’s been rough to grow total Game Pass subscribers, especially beyond console:
“One big, big reason that we think is underdiscussed is the way that both Xbox Game Pass and PlayStation Plus evolved from a ‘pay for multiplayer access’ fee on console… So when players on these consoles have a history of paying $5/month for multiplayer access, gradually morphing the service by adding new features - a couple of free games per month, then a whole catalog of games, is a classic ‘subscription feature creep’ expansion plan…
But PC Game Pass is pitching $10-$15/month subs… to PC gamers who not only a) have never had to pay for multiplayer servers, but b) are used to well-entrenched platforms like Steam doing a good job of implying ‘lifetime ownership’ of games, and c) are a bit suspicious of ‘renting’ PC games. So it’s been a slog.”
There’s also - as we documented in 2023 using an internal Xbox slide deck from 2021-2022 - Xbox’s clever sleight of hand in talking about the swift growth of Game Pass subscribers, but not the corresponding decrease in Xbox Live Gold subscribers. (And the total universe of Game Pass subscribers never reached the 60-80m Xbox hoped for - which might have allowed for pricing closer to their original plans.).
None of this is criminal. Heck, Disney+’s pricing is up 70% since it launched in 2019. But we’re now at the stage where Microsoft’s Dustin Blackwell is telling The Verge: “We understand price increases are never fun for anybody, but we’re trying to reinforce by adding more value to these plans as well.” (Which sounds a tad.. reverse engineer-y?)
So to answer the question posted by the headline: yes, Xbox’s yield increases are the correct business approach, if you’re in a situation where you need to grow but you don’t have a high volume of net new subscribers. But it’s at the cost of Xbox’s NPS (Net promoter score), esp. given the ‘Game pass is profitable’ message from execs. Messy.
When ‘More Like This’ Steam referrals scale up…
When a PC hit lands like 3D Vampire Survivors-like roguelike Megabonk (which we’re estimating at 1.3m Steam units sold, and scaling fast!), how much of the hype is based on visual social media & word of mouth, and how much is platform algorithms?
The answer is that it’s 90% influencers/social media, word of mouth, game quality, and FOMO, of course. But there’s some notable things Valve does on its side, such as:
Algorithmic top of store featuring (when the Autumn Sale isn’t happening!) and top-grossing game inclusions.
Discovery Queue recommendations, which are personalized per player.
The ‘More Like This’ recommendation algorithm appearing on other games’ Steam store pages - which is universal, and weights tag/player interest & revenue.
Our GameDiscoverCo Pro service is now tracking ‘More Like This’ mentions over time (which games link to another) for all Steam games. And Megabonk scaled from 11 games recommending it on Aug. 11th to 15,760 games (!) on Sept. 30th, as it blew up.
The top game recommending it, by LTD Steam revenue? Risk Of Rain 2, a game it also gets majorly compared to. And as you can see, Megabonk was first in the list when we loaded the Steam page just now. Algorithms at work, folks...
Steam: Digimon, FF Tactics excel in their debuts…
