We've heard for a while now that Xbox Game Pass growth is slowing down these days - Microsoft has said that the service has struggled to expand numbers-wise since at least late 2022. Well, the overall US numbers seem to be backing that up, and that's across gaming subscriptions in general.
Circana's Mat Piscatella (NPD Group) has taken to Twitter this week to say that non-mobile video game subscriptions have only grown 1% in the US compared to a year ago. For the year prior, that growth figure was just 2%, with Piscatella saying that the market has "still stalled" since then.
On the Xbox side of things, PC Game Pass and Xbox Cloud Gaming have been pushed in an attempt to expand the service, but clearly, those pushes are still struggling to move the needle when it comes to the core subscription service model at Microsoft. Two months ago, the team announced that Xbox Game Pass had hit 34 million subscribers after almost seven years on the market.
This news drops eerily close to Xbox announcing the shutdowns of four Bethesda development studios in an effort to trim costs and keep Microsoft's gaming business profitable. The Xbox owner is starting to release more games on other platforms as well, with Hi-Fi RUSH, Grounded, Pentiment and Sea Of Thieves all releasing on additional systems over the past few months.