What's new with Xbox Game Pass, you ask? Well, after a surprise slew of announcements from Microsoft on its next-gen Xbox Series X console – coming in late 2020 – we've got confirmation that its Xbox Game Pass subscription service will keep getting first-party titles from their launch dates, with Halo Infinite coming on day one too.
The Xbox Game Pass service acts as a wide library of over 100 games to play on the Xbox One S or Xbox One X, and has been offering a brilliant selection of titles despite its relatively small selection of games compared to PS Now.
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We already expected Halo Infinite – possibly the flagship title for the console as a whole, as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was for Nintendo Switch – to land on the service. It will join other first-party Xbox One games such as Gears 5 and The Outer Worlds (yes, Microsoft owns Obsidian now), as well as The Witcher III and numerous other big-name titles.
And we've now heard in no uncertain terms that other Xbox Series X games will keep up that tradition, meaning future Gears, Halo and Ori games – as well as whatever Microsoft-owned studios like Obsidian or Ninja Theory have in the pipeline, should be hitting Xbox Game Pass on day one too.
All-you-can-eat gaming
Subscription services like Xbox Game Pass or PS Now make increasing financial sense with the glut of titles being published these days – especially in a world of Netflix and Spotify where people are used to dipping in and out of media rather than committing to big one-off purchases, as the gaming industry seemingly still expects them to.
The Xbox Series X will have plenty of internal processing enhancements and neat software features to help elevate next-gen gaming machines from the consoles available today, but Microsoft will need to keep its foot on the accelerator with its add-on services too if it wants to build up the Xbox ecosystem to something truly massive.
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