Xbox Game Pass subscribers fell short of Microsoft’s internal targets because most players simply don’t want to work through large numbers of games, according to Circana senior director Mat Piscatella. Piscatella made the comments on Bluesky, responding to a recent IGN feature that argued Xbox should lean into smaller indie titles to keep subscribers engaged.
“IMO the primary reason Game Pass failed to hit its subscriber targets is because the mass market simply does not care to play lots of games,” Piscatella wrote. “The average player only buys 1 or 2 games a year, spends heaps of time in their favorite forever games, and that’s it.”
Why indie games won’t save Xbox Game Pass subscribers
IGN’s piece traced the rise and recent decline of Game Pass and floated the idea that shorter, more digestible indie games could make the service feel like better value. Subscribers who finish two or three shorter games a month, the argument goes, are more likely to feel they’re getting their money’s worth.
That’s a harder feeling to sustain when the games on offer take dozens of hours to finish, which is where Game Pass has leaned in recent years with big-budget, long-form releases.
Piscatella disagrees with the indie fix. He argues Game Pass has mostly attracted the most dedicated segment of the gaming audience already, not the casual buyers Microsoft needs to reach tens or hundreds of millions of Xbox Game Pass subscribers.
Shifting the lineup toward indie titles, he says, would narrow that audience further rather than widen it. “This approach would appeal to an even smaller portion of the player base than exists now, accelerating the death spiral.”
Game Pass price increases and an uncertain path forward
The warning follows a rocky stretch for the service. A 50% price increase drove away millions of Xbox Game Pass subscribers over just a few months. Microsoft has since walked back some of that cost following the appointment of Asha Sharma as Xbox CEO, though the company has not detailed a broader strategy for the subscription going forward.
Piscatella frames the problem as structural rather than something a lineup change can fix. He points to a handful of always-on live service games that dominate players’ time and spending, leaving little room for a subscription built around variety. “The crushing and devastating impact of the black hole behemoths sucking all the time and money from the rest of the market,” he wrote, is the real obstacle.
“It’s not that [focusing on indie games] is a bad solution, it’s just that for this particular challenge I don’t see a solution,” he said.
“The team was told to turn the games business into a sub model, like everything else Microsoft was doing at the time. If anything was going to work, it would have been what they tried.”