Xbox Game Pass Reportedly Falls Far Short of Its Target

Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass has roughly 30 million subscribers, less than half the 77 million the company once projected it would reach by 2026. The figure comes from the Wall Street Journal, which reported this week that a person familiar with the numbers put the service’s paying membership at around 30 million. It is not an official count. Microsoft has not disclosed a Game Pass total since early 2024, which makes the reported number the clearest read in two years on a business the company has spent tens of billions trying to build.

The timing is not incidental. The reported figure surfaced alongside Xbox’s sharpest retrenchment yet, the 3,200 job cuts and five studio divestitures announced days earlier, and it helps explain the reasoning behind them. The 77 million target itself came from internal documents made public during the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s attempt to block Microsoft’s $69 billion Activision Blizzard purchase; the same materials showed the company had once hoped to carry Game Pass past 100 million subscribers by 2030. Against the nearer goal, 30 million is under 40% of plan.

A number that has gone backwards

For a service pitched to investors as a growth engine, the more damaging detail is that 30 million is lower than where Game Pass stood two years ago. Microsoft’s last official figure came in February 2024, when then-Xbox president Sarah Bond said the service had reached 34 million members — a total that already folded in former Xbox Live Gold subscribers who had been moved into a cheaper Game Pass tier. If the reported 30 million holds, the service has shed roughly four million members, and net growth has effectively stalled since the Activision deal closed. Microsoft stopped publishing milestone numbers once that growth flattened, leaving outside estimates to fill the gap.

Much of the reversal traces to one pricing decision. In October 2025, under then-CEO Phil Spencer, Microsoft raised Game Pass Ultimate by 50%, from $19.99 to $29.99 a month, timing the increase to the launch of Call of Duty: Black Ops 7. Cancellations followed, and the game itself drew a lukewarm reception. In April 2026, new Microsoft Gaming CEO Asha Sharma cut Ultimate back to $22.99 and stopped adding new Call of Duty titles to the service on release day, trading the most expensive headline content for a lower price and stronger retention.

What Sharma is telling staff

Sharma has been unusually direct about the shortfall. In her memo announcing the cuts, she wrote that Microsoft’s bets on Game Pass, multiplatform releases and a broader content lineup “did not grow at the pace we expected,” and said subscriber losses accelerated after last year’s pricing and packaging changes. She described a gaming unit running at margins far below comparable platform and publishing businesses, and cast the layoffs as a reset rather than a one-time trim.

That bluntness reflects how central the subscription became to Microsoft’s strategy. Game Pass anchored its argument that subscriptions, not console sales, would define the next era of gaming, and the company bought studios — Activision Blizzard chief among them — largely to stock the service with day-one exclusives. The economics only work at scale: a bigger base spreads the fixed cost of that content across more paying members. At 30 million, the base is roughly a third of what the plan assumed, which pushes up the effective cost of every marquee game the service gives away on launch day.

Behind on scale, if not on revenue

The service is not failing on money. By Microsoft’s own reporting, Game Pass generated nearly $5 billion in its most recent fiscal year, about a fifth of Xbox’s total gaming revenue, and its catalog still spans hundreds of titles, from marquee first-party games to a rotating free-to-play lineup. What it lacks is reach. It trails its main rival on subscribers as well: Sony’s PlayStation Plus counted about 47 million members in the platform holder’s latest fiscal-year results, a base carried by a far larger installed hardware footprint.

Sharma has said the April price cut has already lifted sign-ups and retention, an early gain she has been careful to call a first step rather than a fix, warning that the company will have to work the problem over time rather than solve it in a single launch. The reset makes the change in thinking plain. With new Call of Duty releases withheld from day-one Game Pass and Microsoft leaning back toward hardware and paid exclusives, raw subscriber count is no longer the sole prize. The figure that now decides whether the strategy pays off is quieter: whether a cheaper, slimmer Game Pass can grow revenue per subscriber faster than it keeps losing members.