- Primary Subject: Xbox Game Pass Subscriber Growth Report
- Key Update: A report claims Game Pass is sitting at around 30 million subscribers, suggesting growth has stalled far below Microsoft’s earlier internal projections of 77 million by 2026.
- Status: Unverified Estimate (No Official Microsoft Confirmation)
- Last Verified: July 7, 2026
- Quick Answer: Game Pass is reportedly holding at around 30 million subscribers, indicating its growth has largely stagnated compared to Microsoft’s earlier expectations.
Xbox Game Pass has spent years being treated as the future of Microsoft's gaming business, but its subscriber count may be almost exactly where it was several years ago.
A new report claims the service currently has around 30 million members, putting it nowhere near the enormous audience Xbox once expected to have by 2026.
How Many Xbox Game Pass Subscribers Are There?
Xbox Game Pass reportedly has around 30 million subscribers, according to The Wall Street Journal, which attributed the figure to a person familiar with the matter.
Microsoft has not officially confirmed the number, so it should still be treated as an estimate. If accurate, however, the figure suggests Game Pass has barely moved in years.
Microsoft announced 25 million subscribers in January 2022 before revealing a total of 34 million in February 2024, although the latter figure included members of the former Xbox Live Gold tier after it was folded into Game Pass Core.
The reported 30 million figure would therefore leave the service below its last publicly announced total and only around five million members ahead of where it stood more than four years ago.
That is a long way from what Microsoft once envisioned. Internal documents made public during the legal battle over its Activision Blizzard acquisition projected around 77 million Game Pass subscribers by 2026, with the figure expected to pass 100 million by 2030.
Former Xbox boss Phil Spencer argued at the time that the projections actually underestimated the growth Microsoft expected, particularly outside traditional Xbox consoles.
The service has now reportedly reached less than half of that 77 million target.
Why Has Xbox Game Pass Growth Stalled?
Price increases appear to have pushed millions of people away just as Game Pass was already struggling to find new subscribers.
The biggest blow came in 2025, when Microsoft raised the price of Game Pass Ultimate by 50% to $30 per month.
Xbox chief strategy officer Matthew Ball later said the increase cost the service millions of subscribers, and Microsoft eventually lowered the price to $23 per month.
New Xbox CEO Asha Sharma said in June that Game Pass had started growing again after more than eight months of decline, but the reported 30 million total suggests it has yet to recover its previous peak.
The problem appears to go beyond one unpopular price hike, with Xbox reportedly failing to get the growth it expected from years of expanding Game Pass to PC and cloud gaming.
Even adding Call of Duty to the service at launch did not create the enormous surge the company needed, while Bloomberg previously reported that putting Black Ops 6 on Game Pass may have cost Microsoft roughly $300 million in lost sales.
Microsoft has since started reversing some of those decisions. Game Pass Ultimate got cheaper, but it also lost day-one access to new Call of Duty games, a significant break from the first-party launch strategy the service had long promoted.
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