Game Pass has always been sold to players as the best deal in gaming, but according to a new report, plenty of people inside Xbox Games Studios do not see it that way at all. In fact, some of them apparently can’t stand it.
Xbox Leadership and Game Pass
The claim comes from Jason Schreier from Bloomberg, who spoke about the mood inside Xbox during a recent episode of the Triple Click podcast. According to Schreier, “There are a lot of people out there in studio leadership within Xbox who absolutely detest Game Pass and think it has destroyed the value of their games.”
He went on to say that these leaders believe the service has stripped value away from games across the board and has been a net negative for the industry, specifically because of how it makes games feel cheaper as a product.
He was clear that this reflects the private views of certain people in studio leadership, not a company statement. Microsoft has not confirmed any of it. Still, coming from a reporter with Schreier’s track record inside the industry, it carries weight, and it lines up with things a lot of developers have been muttering for years.
Studio Leaders Feel Game Pass Devalues Their Work
The frustration is not hard to understand once you sit with it for a second. When a game you spent years building lands on a subscription service on day one, a big chunk of your potential buyers never actually buy it. They just wait for it to hit Game Pass, play it as part of a monthly fee they already pay, and move on. From a creative and business point of view, that feels like your work is being treated as filler content rather than a product worth paying full price for.
The “I’ll just wait for Game Pass” habit became a running joke in the community for a reason. Every time Xbox announced a first-party release, a wave of players would reply saying they would grab it on the service instead of buying it. Great for the player. A lot less exciting for the team that poured their lives into shipping it.
This Follows a Rough Stretch for Xbox and Game Pass
The timing makes the report sting even more. Xbox has been through a brutal stretch of layoffs, studio shakeups, and strategy reversals, and Game Pass sits close to the center of a lot of it. After the wildly unpopular price hike in late 2025 that pushed Ultimate up to thirty dollars a month, Microsoft reportedly lost a big chunk of subscribers and eventually walked the pricing back.
In April 2026, under new leadership, Ultimate dropped to just under twenty-three dollars a month, and PC Game Pass came down too. The catch was that new Call of Duty releases would no longer land on the service on launch day, instead showing up roughly a year later. That single change said a lot. Even Xbox seems to understand that throwing its most expensive, most valuable releases onto a subscription the moment they launch does not make the numbers work anymore.
Could Xbox Drop Day One Games From Game Pass?
Schreier does not think Xbox is going to kill Game Pass. He expects it to stick around. What he does see as likely is a slow move away from day one first-party launches on the service. In other words, keep the subscription alive with older titles and smaller games while the big tentpole releases go back to being sold the traditional way at full price.
There is a working blueprint for this already. PlayStation runs a successful subscription without dumping its biggest exclusives onto it at launch, leaning on its back catalog instead. If Xbox follows that path, it would be a quiet admission that the original “everything on day one” pitch, the thing that made Game Pass feel too good to be true, was never built to last.
Nothing here is confirmed policy, so it is worth keeping expectations grounded. Microsoft has not announced any plan to pull day-one games, and internal grumbling does not always turn into strategy. But the fact that this sentiment exists at the leadership level, at the exact moment Xbox is cutting prices, cutting Call of Duty, and cutting jobs, tells you the company is rethinking what Game Pass is actually for. The next year or two of Xbox releases will probably tell us whether the people who “detest” the service end up winning that argument.
