Assassin's Creed kicks off new Xbox Game Pass and Ubisoft partnership

Assassin's Creed Origins
(Image credit: Ubisoft)

Microsoft has announced the next batch of titles hitting Xbox Game Pass this month, as it rolls out the first fruits of its new Ubisoft partnership.

Assassin’s Creed Origins and For Honor: Marching Fire Edition headline the releases. According to an Xbox Wire blog post, they’ll be available to play on Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PC, and Xbox Cloud Gaming.

They mark the start of a new partnership between Microsoft and Ubisoft that was announced back in April. Xbox Game Pass community lead Megan Spuur said Microsoft would be “working with Ubisoft to bring even more incredible games to the Game Pass Library”, telling us that “more Ubisoft Games [will be] coming to Game Pass” in the future.

A man firing a bow from horseback in Assassin's Creed Origins

(Image credit: Ubisoft)

Big changes are afoot

The full scope of that partnership hasn’t been fully detailed, but it could lead to some significant changes for the subscription platform. More legacy titles will likely be added to the service, such as Assassin's Creed Valhalla, but it also opens the door to more launch day titles, too. Earlier this year, Ubisoft's Rainbow Six Extraction hit Game Pass on the same day of its retail release. If that trend continues, players will get to play forthcoming blockbuster Ubisoft games through their existing subscription – a major boon.

However, Ubisoft isn’t putting all of its pixelated eggs in one basket. In May, Sony announced it too had partnered with Ubisoft for its revamped PS Plus service. Members of the PS Plus Premium tier will get access to Ubisoft+, handing them a slate of older Ubisoft titles to dig into. As it so happens, that will include For Honor and Assassin’s Creed Origins.

For now, it remains to be seen if either Xbox Game Pass or PS Plus will be privy to triple-A Ubisoft titles on launch day. Such a partnership would especially be beneficial for Sony. The publisher has already said it won’t be adding its own first-party games to PS Plus on launch day for the foreseeable future, so any release day titles from other publishers will go far to improve the platform's value.

Elsewhere in the blog post, it lists all the other games coming to Xbox Game Pass this month. They include:

  • For Honor: Marching Fire Edition (Cloud, Console, and PC) – June 1
  • Ninja Gaiden: Master Collection (Console and PC) – June 2
  • Assassin’s Creed Origins (Cloud, Console and PC) – June 7
  • Chorus (Cloud, Console, and PC) – June 7
  • Disc Room (Cloud, Console, and PC) – June 7
  • Spacelines from the Far Out (Console and PC) – June 7
Callum Bains
Gaming News Writer

Callum is TechRadar Gaming’s News Writer. You’ll find him whipping up stories about all the latest happenings in the gaming world, as well as penning the odd feature and review. Before coming to TechRadar, he wrote freelance for various sites, including Clash, The Telegraph, and Gamesindustry.biz, and worked as a Staff Writer at Wargamer. Strategy games and RPGs are his bread and butter, but he’ll eat anything that spins a captivating narrative. He also loves tabletop games, and will happily chew your ear off about TTRPGs and board games.