Xbox mobile game store will only sell microtransactions to start

Microsoft has grand ambitions to capture some of the $90 billion mobile games market with an Xbox mobile store, but the digital shop won't actually sell games when it launches.

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Microsoft plans to launch an Xbox mobile store experience in July, but what will it look like? According to Game File's Stephen Totilo, the store will only sell microtransactions at launch. The store has been a long time coming but Microsoft didn't take the plunge until now due not having enough mobile titles to justify an entire competing store.

Emboldened by the Activision Blizzard King acquisition, which armed Microsoft with three heavy-hitting mobile powerhouses (Candy Crush, Call of Duty Mobile, and Diablo Immortal), and European Union's new Digital Markets Act, the company has now decided to flip the switch and greenlight its mobile plans.

Exact details on the Xbox mobile store are unknown, but Xbox president Sarah Bond did say that Microsoft will onboard partners into the store at a later date. It's possible that these partners include some of the best names in mobile gaming as Microsoft attempts to subvert the costly 30% commission on all in-game purchases and sales on iOS and Android with their own store option.

"We're going to start by bringing our own first-party portfolio to that. So you're going to see games like Candy Crush show up in that experience, games like Minecraft, and then we're going to extend that capability to partners so that they can also take advantage of it and have a true cross-platform, gaming-centric mobile experience," Xbox president Sarah Bond said in a recent Bloomberg interview.

It's also possible that the mobile store will link with a new tier of Xbox Game Pass that's specifically designed to give phone gamers some amount of savings on in-game items, purchases, and/or season passes.