This has been a very strange year for Xbox. You could say that Microsoft’s gaming brand has had a great year or that it’s had one of the worst, and either way I’d probably nod in agreement with most of your points.
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Sure, Xbox released a host of games across console, PC, and mobile, but the company also made Game Pass an expensive mess. And yes, Xbox had a great showcase this yeargiving fans an exciting roadmap for the future, but Microsoft’s gaming division also fired many people while trying to explain that this was all part of the plan. Everything is going well, they say, but it’s starting to get suspicious how often the executives keep telling us that.
Last year I suggested that Xbox was in a position to have a big 2024and for the most part it did. But I also worried about what it would cost. And in 2024, we found out what price Xbox would be willing to pay.
Activision and Bethesda save Xbox, but suffer for it
This was the first year of a new Xbox era. The company now fully owns and operates both Activision/Blizzard/King and Bethesda, in addition to the other studios it has acquired in recent years. And thanks to Activision and Bethesda, Microsoft had a solid video game release schedule in 2024.
Call of Duty: Black Ops6 was one of the biggest games of the year and because Xbox now fully owns Activision, it arrived on Game Pass on day one. Blizzard has released an expansion for Diablo 4, which arrived on Game Pass in early 2024and made an already good game bigger and better. Bethesda has released its first expansion Starfield as well as launching Elder Scrolls Castles on mobile and a new extension for Elder Scrolls Online. And it ended the year with a big Game Pass launch: Indiana Jones and the Great Circleone of the better rated games of 2024. Meanwhile World of Warcraft got a new extension, CoD Warzone mobile arrived on phones and some old Activision games like Spyro And Crash Bandicoot have been added to the Game Pass library.
When it comes to new games and new things to play, well, without these games and expansions from Activision and Bethesda (many of which have ended up on Game Pass) Xbox would be a very quiet and perhaps a very disappointing year. And yet these big publishers — and all the staff they employ that helped make this a good year for Xbox — weren’t safe from layoffs and closures.
Screenshot: Activision
In January, Microsoft announced it would lay off approximately 1,900 employees at Activision, Bethesda and other Xbox studios. This came just three months after Xbox formally acquired Activision, leading to the FTC files a formal complaint. The FTC says this is exactly the kind of thing the agency was concerned about when it tried to prevent Microsoft from buying Activision.
Then, four months later, Xbox even got fired more people. On May 7, Xbox announced it would close three Bethesda studios—Tango Gamework (HiFi rush), Arkane Austin (Redfall), and Alpha Dog Games (Mighty fate) – with a fourth supporting studio, Roundhouse Studios, being absorbed by the team behind it Elder Scrolls Online. (There were even more Xbox cuts in September.)
As always, those in charge said this was necessary for a better future, a feeling that becomes increasingly difficult to swallow as they all keep saying this every year after each round of layoffs.
And ironically, after the layoffs of all these Bethesda and Activision employees, some of Xbox’s biggest games this year came from the very same companies. Xbox liked to spend millions on advertising Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, The Elder Scrolls Online‘s new expansion, and Call of duty. But it hasn’t been as willing to support the staff behind this and other games from its publishing family a year with record layoffs across the sector. The Game Pass machine still requires more blood, regardless of the state of the world.
The enshittification of the Xbox Game Pass
Speaking of Game Pass, in 2024, Xbox’s video game subscription service received many new games. Here are just some of the games that arrived on Game Pass day one: Palworld, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, MLB The Show 2024, Harold Halibut, Hellblade 2, Dungeons of Hinterberg, Ara: History Untold, Call of Duty Black Ops 6, And Metal Slug Tactics. And in addition to the day one launches, Game Pass has also added older games like the Resident Evil 2 remakeControl, Death Island 2and more to the library.
However, Xbox Game Pass isn’t exactly the easy-to-recommend deal of years past. That’s because Xbox announced big changes to Game Pass in July.
Image: Xbox/Kotaku
Previously it was simple: you paid a monthly fee and got every new first-party Xbox game and some other releases. If you paid more you also got PC and streaming games.
But over the summer, Xbox announced a major price increase for all Xbox subscriptions. Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, the all-inclusive subscription, went from $17 to $20. Meanwhile, the console-only subscription, which previously cost $11 per month, was discontinued and replaced with a new “Game Pass Standard” tier that cost $15 per month and would no longer include day one releases. Xbox explained that there would eventually be day one releases on Standard, but did not specify a timeframe.
To summarize: everyone pays more for Game Pass, but not everyone gets access to big new games like Call of Duty Black Ops 6 at launch. Not great! As long as Game Pass has existed, the promise of first-party titles such as Halo has been its big selling point. But in 2024, Xbox, ostensibly to help cover Activision’s nearly $70 billion cost, has ruined what was once the best deal in gaming.
Everything is an Xbox, including your PS5 and Switch
Perhaps the weirdest Microsoft storyline to unfold in 2024 is the way the company tried to navigate declining console sales while simultaneously telling Xbox fans not to worry.
I mean, if you look at everything that happened in 2024, it doesn’t paint a good picture for Xbox consoles. Once more, Xbox sales were terrible compared to PlayStation and Nintendo in 2024. Allegedlysome publishers are unsure if they will continue releasing games on Xbox consoles due to the small player base.
Xbox too started porting more of its games to other platforms, causing a shitstorm among the most loyal cult members. Then you had that Xbox’s strange marketing campaign that essentially told people: “Hey, you don’t have to buy an Xbox to play our games!Meanwhile, upcoming games from Xbox-owned studios are coming out Doom: the Dark Ages And The outside worlds 2will launch on PS5 in 2025. And according to Xbox: even Halo could one day appear on a PlayStation. Oh, and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, that big Xbox exclusive gem that launched in December is nevertheless heading to PS5 next year Xbox boss Phil Spencer previously said this wouldn’t happen.
All of this seems to indicate that Xbox is pulling a Sega and going multiplatform in the future. However, Spencer and others at Xbox keep saying otherwise. “We will definitely be making more consoles and other devices in the future,” Spencer said Rolling stone in November. The Xbox boss also claimed that the company is also working on a Steam Deck-like handheld device. But that will take years and could be canned before it ever sees the light of day.
And yet, in the same month he promised more hardware, Xbox finally started letting users play some of the games they already owned via streaming without an Xbox console.
According to Xbox, the future certainly includes new consoles, but you won’t have to buy them because Microsoft’s games will be available via the cloud or ported to other platforms. That sounds less like a confident and well-developed blueprint for the future and more like a messy bundle of promises and individual plans meant to distract us from reality.
The future looks strange for Xbox and Microsoft
As 2024 draws to a close, here’s the reality of the situation: Xbox seems to be moving forward aimlessly as Microsoft focuses most of its money on AI.
Sure, Xbox has a huge stable of studios and publishers that will help it develop and release more games than ever before on more platforms in 2025 and beyond. However, it seems that it cannot support all these studios and continues to close them or lay people off.
Game Pass is now a questionable and expensive subscription that is a very crappy version of what we used to have, and will likely only get worse as Microsoft strives to grow its numbers amid a lack of new users.
And if you’re looking to buy a new console, investing in an Xbox Series X/S almost seems like a gamble at this point. I’m not suggesting that Microsoft will flip a switch and discontinue its consoles overnight. But as the company increasingly invests in streaming and makes more of its exclusive games multiplatform, there are fewer and fewer reasons to own an Xbox, whatever that means in 2024.
2025 could also be a huge year for Xbox. New games from Bethesda, Activision and its own studios are coming in the coming months, with more likely to be announced over the course of the year. But 2024 was also a big year for Xbox; the costs consisted only of massive job losses, large price increases and multiple studio closures. So while some Xbox fans may be looking forward to another big year, I’m really concerned about how much more blood will be shed to pay for it.
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