GAME PASS IS PROFITABLE, APPARENTLY: A WHIPLASH-INDUCING RUMOR CORRECTION
In a news cycle that gave the entire games industry whiplash, the great "Is Game Pass Profitable?" debate went from a raging fire to a puff of smoke in about 24 hours. After a report from journalist Chris Dring sparked speculation that the service was a money pit, a swift and decisive correction has put the matter to bed: yes, the big green machine is making money.
A Firestorm of Speculation
For a hot minute, the internet was on fire. The narrative, sparked by an initial report from Dring, was that Xbox Game Pass might be a house of cards. The idea was that its "profitability" was just clever accounting, ignoring the mountains of lost sales from big first-party titles like
Starfield and Halo being given away on day one. It was a juicy story, the kind that fuels a thousand console war forum posts and smug YouTube videos. For a moment, it seemed like the critics were right, and Microsoft's grand experiment was just a money-burning furnace with a fancy green logo.
The Inevitable Correction
Of course, it didn't take long for the corporate monolith to make its presence felt. Dring quickly issued a major correction that felt less like a simple update and more like a "MS legal just contacted me" damage control post. After his initial report, sources—the kind of sources "who would know," which is journalist-speak for "someone from Microsoft with a spreadsheet probably called me"—reached out to set the record straight.
The clarification? Game Pass isn't just profitable on its own; it's still profitable even when you factor in all the "lost" revenue from first-party games. The cannibalized sales, the missed microtransaction opportunities—all of it. According to the new info, the bottom line is still black. So much for the impending collapse.
Reading Between the Lines
This whole saga leaves a cynical taste in your mouth. Was it a genuine reporting error or a classic case of getting your clicks before posting the less exciting truth? Who knows. But the correction aligns with what many have been saying for years: Microsoft is a publicly-traded company with shareholders breathing down its neck. They aren't in the business of running a multi-billion dollar charity. If Game Pass wasn't making money, they would have taken it out behind the shed and shot it years ago.
The bigger, more interesting question, as some have pointed out, is how it's profitable. Is it because millions are buying it for the massive library of games, or because a huge chunk of its revenue comes from the subscription that's mandatory for playing most games online at all? The lines between Game Pass Ultimate (the all-you-can-eat service) and Game Pass Core (the new Xbox Live Gold) are blurry, and that's probably by design.
At the end of the day, the whiplash-inducing news cycle leaves us right back where we started. Game Pass is a financially stable part of the Xbox ecosystem, and anyone who thought a company like Microsoft would hemorrhage billions for years without a plan was kidding themselves. The whole saga was a fun bit of industry drama, but the real story isn't whether Game Pass is profitable, It’s how “journalists” truly have no idea, and ,well, dear readers, neither do I.