Microsoft Reportedly Wanted 100 Million Xbox Game Pass Subscribers Before 2030

Xbox has been in a bit of a sorry state in recent years, though its first-party lineup of titles scheduled to release this year is arguably one of its most impressive for the past decade. Despite that, questions have been raised over exclusivity, with high profile titles like Doom: The Dark Ages and The Outer Worlds 2 releasing on PlayStation, and the future of the console is still pretty uncertain.

In fact, it sounds as though Microsoft itself wasn’t quite sure what to do with Xbox back in 2021. According to a new report by The Information (which is paywalled), Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella had to make a choice between acquiring major game studios in an attempt to bolster Xbox Game Pass and its cloud gaming services, or to wind down Xbox entirely.

Since Xbox is still alive and kicking (barely), and Microsoft has since acquired the likes of Bethesda and Activision Blizzard, we know that Nadella went for the former. However, it’s worth noting that Xbox was just a single year into the release of the Xbox Series X back in 2021, and having to make that kind of decision so early is slightly concerning.

Microsoft Reportedly Wanted 100 Million Xbox Game Pass Subscribers Before 2030

Microsoft has been all in on Game Pass and cloud gaming recently, even attempting to distance itself from its own console with the bizarre “This Is An Xbox” marketing campaign that’s going on at the minute. It starts to make a bit more sense when you find out that Microsoft reportedly wanted Xbox Game Pass to have 100 million subscribers before 2030.

That’s also according to The Information, which claims Microsoft set this target before the acquisition of Activision Blizzard. It seems as though Microsoft planned for the deal to have a much greater impact than it had, and The Information reports that the company also hoped that the deal would coax other developers into renting Azure cloud servers. Safe to say that didn’t really happen either.

If Microsoft was to meet its targets set back in 2021, that would mean the company would need to bring in a whopping 66 million more Game Pass subscribers in just five years. Of course, targets can change internally, and it would be surprising if the higher-ups at Microsoft still believed they could hit those targets, but it’s still a worrying sign that things aren’t going the way that Microsoft intended.

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