Today at Xbox Games Showcase and Starfield Direct, we showcased the exciting future for gamers and game developers – dozens of new games, a new 1TB Series S console, and new ways for gamers to get their games anywhere, with PC Game Pass for NVIDIA GeForce NOW later this year. After our double feature “Head of Xbox” Phil SpencerHead of Xbox Creator Experience, Sarah BondHead of Xbox Game Studios, Matt Bootyand Game Director at Bethesda Game Studios, Todd Howard Our “What’s Next for Gaming” event was also about the future of gaming at Microsoft.
Gamers are discovering and playing games like never before – we’ve hit new records for monthly active users and monthly active devices, and just in the last quarter we saw a 46% year-over-year increase in PC gaming with Game Pass. Game Pass continues to grow – our total subscription revenue reached nearly $1 billion last quarter.
We’re excited about the future of Xbox and see the opportunity to grow not just our own business, but the entire industry – by creating groundbreaking new games, inviting developers to bring their dream projects to our platform, and by… Opening up gaming to everyone, no matter where in the world. These are our main pillars to continue this growth.
Xbox players of all formats will experience the arrival of new exclusives more reliably
We know gamers choose Xbox because of the great content. Our goal is to release at least four first-party games per year – although we also balance this by carefully considering the needs of each project. This is in addition to the work our teams are doing to grow our existing communities that we have nurtured over many years The Elder Scrolls Online, Sea of Thieves, Minecraft, Forza
Our first-party games now have over 150 million monthly active users. We strive to invest in new franchises, take risks and develop the most diverse game offerings of any company in the industry – and the like fable, Clockwork Revolution, Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II and more represent the most ambitious series of games we’ve ever presented.
Naturallystarfield is one of those games. With a simultaneous release on Xbox Series X|S, PC and Steam – with Game Pass Day One on Xbox, PC and Cloud – we are confident starfield will be Bethesda Game Studios’ most-played title of all time. Bethesda Game Studios has long been built on the Xbox development platform, and now that Bethesda is part of the Xbox family, we’ve been able to support them more than ever – and enable the team to create the most ambitious game in the studio’s history, in their first new universe in over 25 years.
We enable creatives of all sizes
In today’s showcase we included: [email protected] games like Hinterberg dungeona game by a couple from Austria who shared a showcase with their debut title starfield. With our support, we enable developers of all sizes to create the games they want, at any scale they need.
To achieve this, we offer multiple paths into the company and multiple paths to success. Our indie program [email protected]has paid out over $4 billion to over 5,000 creators in over 100 countries. Our new Developer Acceleration Program is helping bring new, lesser-heard voices into the space — we’ve already helped fund projects from 30 underrepresented developers and are on-going with 250 more.
Game Pass provides a way for millions of members to play games. One of Sarah Bond’s favorite notes from the showcase is that each of the Game Pass titles featured this year is from a developer who has previously published a game with Game Pass. We’ve also expanded PC Game Pass to 46 more markets, bringing the total to 86 markets, allowing game developers to reach millions of people in new countries.
There are currently more than 5,000 games in development for Xbox by developers from 100 countries – that’s more third-party games in development than at any time in Xbox history. With this source of future games, our vision is to enable Xbox to offer the most diverse and accessible assortment in the industry – you’re never far from finding your next favorite game.
We want to bring gaming everywhere
In today’s showcase we showed Forza Motorsport, Starfield, south of midnightand most importantly, next-gen games – titles that harness the power of the Xbox Series It’s time for the lineup of exclusives we showed off today.
With Xbox Series S, we’re also offering the most affordable entry into the next generation, bringing modern gaming to more players than ever before. It’s a strategy that works – our data shows that more than half of Series S buyers were new to the Xbox platform – and today we’ve built on that strategy. We’ve heard your calls for more storage – with With the new black Series S, we’ve introduced a version of the console with 1TB of storage, perfect for those looking to build a larger library on their console. It will go on sale on September 1st. Also, we recently worked with our partners WD and Seagate to lower the price of our expandable storage and introduce more sizing options for our plug-and-play solution.
We’re also making the Xbox console experience even faster and easier to use, and we’re working on a whole new home user experience. After several months of testing and continually refining our Insider program based on Insider feedback and user research, we will be rolling out a new discoverability-based look in the coming months, available to all users.
Today we announced that Game Pass members will soon be able to stream select PC games from the library through Nvidia GeForce NOW. This allows the PC Game Pass catalog to be played on any device GeForce NOW streams to, e.g. B. on low-end PCs, Macs, Chromebooks, mobile devices, TVs and more. We will roll this out in the coming months. We’re excited about our future – we want to grow the industry, release great new first-party titles every year, give partners more ways to deliver and access games, and provide multiple ways to play them all, wherever ours players want to play. We look forward to embarking on this journey together with our community.
