So what does Game Pass represent in the Xbox journey on PC?[FONT="]A couple of years ago, more than a couple now, Microsoft Store and Windows launched, we had [UWP] games in there. One of the challenges I had in that time [was], what value were we uniquely bringing to the PC gamer? Between GOG and Steam and stuff there were solutions. If you wanted to go buy PC games, there were solutions for you to go buy PC games. If you were a developer who wanted to reach millions of PC gamers, there were stores that allowed you to reach millions of PC gamers, so it was a little bit unclear what value-add we were bringing other than another storefront.[/FONT]
[FONT="]After I gained a little more control, I guess, in what we were going to do in that space, sitting back in the team and saying 'okay, what unique value can we add in PC?', one was to continue to ship our first-party games on PC and on Xbox at the same time. Obviously we build those games, that's unique to us. And then Game Pass, as we watched over the last two years there's tremendous success we've had on console, and it's actually been healthy not only for the player but also the creator community in helping them reach new customers. We said 'okay, maybe Game Pass is something we could bring to PC'. We went out and talked and did some focus testing, and went over to my friends at Valve, talked to them about it, and say 'hey, how do people think, is this something we think would be additive to what is already there?'. We got a lot of 'yeah this is something you guys should go try', to build a gaming subscription that's working for you on Xbox to PC. [/FONT]
[FONT="]What that meant was we were going to have to have a way of downloading and entitling games on PC, so we effectively were going to have to rework our store, which you can see from the Xbox app now. [/FONT]
[FONT="]But then I didn't want people to think this was our attempt to go and push all the other stores out of the way. In fact, if you want to buy games from us, we want to give you a choice where you buy those games. So the announcement of Halo MCC coming to both Steam and our store was us saying you should be able to buy the games where you want to buy them. We want to make sure the communities are all connected, so we obviously had to work with Valve ensuring that regardless of where you bought the game you'd be one community of PC players together. But Xbox Game Pass for PC was really something that we thought that we could bring that was unique to that ecosystem.
