Xbox Leadership Team Discuss What’s Next for Gaming

Following today’s Xbox Games Showcase and Starfield Direct double feature, members of the Xbox leadership team spoke in the What’s Next For Gaming panel. The panel dived into topics around Xbox’s present and future with Phil Spencer, Head of Xbox, Sarah Bond, Head of Xbox Creator Experience, Matt Booty, Head of Xbox Game Studios, and Todd Howard, Game Director of Bethesda Game Studios.

From chatting about the dozens of games in the Showcase, to discussing Xbox business strategy topics such as Game Pass, new aspirations to releasing first-party games every quarter, and Xbox’s vision for growing the industry, highlights included:

Players Playing Everywhere

o   Last Quarter, we’ve seen a 46% increase year over year in people playing PC games on Game Pass

o   We’ve expanded PC Game pass to 46 more markets, bringing it to a total of 86, so game developers can reach millions of people in new countries

o   We announced Game Pass members will soon be able to stream select PC games from the library through NVIDIA’s GeForce NOW. This will enable the PC Game Pass catalog to be played on any device that GeForce NOW streams to, like low spec PCs, Macs, Chromebooks, mobile devices, TVs, and more, and we’ll be rolling this out in the months ahead.

Xbox Is Committed to Delivering Great Games

o   In the last five years, our teams across Xbox Game Studios and Bethesda have shipped 10 games with over 10 million players each life to date, from new IPs like Sea of Thieves and Grounded, to franchise entries like Minecraft Legends and Elder Scrolls Online.

o   Xbox has now surpassed 500 million lifetime unique users across our first-party titles. And when you look at it collectively, our 1P games have over 150 million monthly active users.

o   We showed a number of exciting titles at this year’s showcase including Starfield, Forza Motorsport, and Avowed and have an ambition to deliver at least four first-party games a year. For a closer look at all the amazing games coming to Xbox, you can dive in here.

o   Game Pass continues to grow – our revenue from subscriptions overall reached nearly $1 billion last quarter.

o   Our indie program, ID@Xbox, has now paid out over $4 billion to over 5,000 creators in over 100 countries.

o   There are currently more than 5,000 games in development for Xbox – that’s more games in development from third parties than at any time in Xbox history.

Console Remains at Core of Xbox Business

o   We debuted the new Xbox Series S in Carbon Black with 1TB of storage – a result of direct community feedback for more storage space. Available this September, you can learn more about it here.

o   More than half of players who purchased a Series S last year were new to Xbox