dollar purchase of holding company ZeniMax Media in March 2021. Since 2019, Microsoft has made several key acquisitions (Double Fine, InXile Entertainment, Ninja Theory, Obsidian Entertainment, Playground Games) before making a big splash with their 7.5 billion U.S. To remedy this, Microsoft began to realign its first party studios first into unified Microsoft Studios (2017) and then rebranded this collection of gaming studios into Xbox Game Studios (2019). Compared to the PlayStation or Nintendo Switch, there were fewer major first- or third-party exclusives, and several flagship Microsoft exclusives also underperformed or were delayed or cancelled. In November 2020, EA Play was integrated into the XBox Game Pass Ultimate and instantly doubled its user reach.Įxpanding the content library via strategic acquisitionsĪt launch, the Xbox One platform, and subsequently the Xbox Game Pass, have frequently been criticized for the lack of platform-exclusive releases. EA Play has been live in several iterations, known as Origin Access on PC and EA Access on consoles. This higher-priced tier also includes EA Play, a subscription service for video games published by Electronic Arts. In April 2019, Microsoft also introduced Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, which bundles Game Pass with an Xbox Live Gold subscription.

With the multiplayer subscription service Xbox Live Gold already being a part of the online gaming experience on the Xbox One console, Microsoft introduced a separate on-demand subscription service for gaming content, known as Xbox Game Pass, in the second half of the console’s lifecycle. The overall reach of the Microsoft Xbox Network was an estimated 120 million monthly active users.

Xbox Game Pass reported 25 million subscribers in January 2022. First launched in June 2017 on the Xbox One, Xbox Game Pass is Microsoft's cross-platform gaming subscription service, which allows users to play online multiplayer, access a rotating library of games, and other services, depending on the subscription tier.

Xbox live game pass library