Game Pass made $2 billion per year during the pandemic, former Xbox lead says

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Xbox Game Pass may have generated $2 billion in annual revenue during the pandemic

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Game Pass is somewhat of a mystery. Over the years, we've indirectly discovered how much money the service makes. Brazilian regulatory board CADE accidentally published that Game Pass made $2.9 billion in 2021 (this info was later redacted). Then in 2022, Phil Spencer gave us a percentage that we used to calculate Game Pass earnings for both 2021 and 2022.

Somehow we missed an interesting tidbit from the LinkedIn profile of Richie Choudhary, who served as the Xbox head of product from 2019 - 2021. According to Choudhary, Game Pass "stands at $2 billion per year," indicating that the service could have made $2 billion throughout 2021, or even that Game Pass made around $2 billion per year in the 3-year span from 2019 - 2021.

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If CADE's $2.9 billion figure is accurate, here's how that data would fit into Xbox's gaming earnings for that year.

This info somewhat clashes with the calculations we made based on Phil Spencer's WSJ appearance. According to those calculations,

• 2021 - $1.258 to $1.887 billion
• 2022 - $1.197 to $1.796 billion

However, it's possible that these values could be rounded up to an even $2 billion, further corroborating Choudhary's assertions.

Meanwhile, Xbox Game Pass subscribers are currently at 34 million, but this number includes users who were converted from Xbox LIVE into Xbox Game Pass Core.

This obfuscates data and makes it difficult to determine growth on the service.

According to Cirana analyst Mat Piscatella, US consumer spending on subscriptions has remained relatively flat over the last few years despite a jump thanks to Call of Duty's inclusion on Game Pass.

Analysts however expect Game Pass to make a whopping $5.5 billion throughout 2025.

Here's the full section from LinkedIn:

"Expertise in building out large-scale services which personalize content and ads for Xbox users, in Console, on PC and on Xbox.com.

"As a Manager, I led the creation and delivery of a contextual AI, ML based personalization service and a shopping experience that generated a new and growing revenue stream of 2.74B/yr. I started with a lean cross functional team and expanded to manage multiple PMs across the company.

"I also drove the strategic effort to accelerate PC gaming growth via Game Pass adoption through native software as well as cloud gaming. Game pass stands at 2B/yr revenue."