This was a really weird year for Xbox. You could argue that Microsoft’s gaming brand had an amazing year or that it had one of its worst, and either way I’d likely find myself nodding in agreement to most of your points.
Sure, Xbox put out a large number of games across console, PC, and mobile, but the company also made Game Pass an expensive mess. And yeah, Xbox had a great showcase this year, giving fans an exciting roadmap for the future, but Microsoft’s gaming division also laid off a lot of people while trying to explain that this was all part of the plan. Everything is fine, they say, but it’s starting to get suspicious how often the people in charge keep telling us that.
Last year, I suggested that Xbox was in a position to have a big 2024, and for the most part, it did. But I also worried what it would cost. And in 2024, we discovered what price Xbox would be willing pay.
This was the first year of a new Xbox era. The company now fully owns and operates both Activision/Blizzard/King and Bethesda, alongside the other studios its bought up over the last few years. And thanks to Activision and Bethesda, Microsoft had a solid video game release schedule in 2024.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 was one of the year’s biggest games and, because Xbox now completely owns Activision, it arrived on Game Pass on day one. Blizzard released an expansion for Diablo 4, which arrived on Game Pass in early 2024, and made an already good game bigger and better. Bethesda put out its first expansion for Starfield as well as launching Elder Scrolls Castles on mobile and a new expansion for Elder Scrolls Online. And It ended the year with a big Game Pass launch: Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, one of the better-reviewed games of 2024. Meanwhile, World of Warcraft got a new expansion, CoD Warzone Mobile arrived on phones, and some old Activision games like Spyro and Crash Bandicoot were added to Game Pass’s library.
When it comes to new games and new things to play, well, without these Activision and Bethesda games and expansions—many of which landed on Game Pass—Xbox would have had a very quiet and, arguably, a very disappointing year. And yet, these big publishers—and all the staff they employ who helped make this a good year for Xbox—weren’t safe from layoffs and closures.
In January, Microsoft announced it was laying off around 1,900 employees across Activision, Bethesda, and other Xbox studios. This came just three months after Xbox had formally acquired Activision, and led to the FTC filing a formal complaint. The FTC says that this is exactly the type of thing the agency was worried about when it tried to stop Microsoft from buying Activision.
Then, four months later, Xbox laid off even more people. On May 7, Xbox announced it was closing three Bethesda-owned studios—Tango Gameworks (Hi-Fi Rush), Arkane Austin (Redfall), and Alpha Dog Games (Mighty Doom)—with a fourth support studio, Roundhouse Studios, being absorbed by the team behind Elder Scrolls Online. (There were even more Xbox cuts in September.)
As always, the people in charge said this was necessary for a better future, a sentiment which grows harder to swallow when they all keep saying this every year after each round of firings.
And ironically, after laying off all these Bethesda and Activision employees, some of Xbox’s biggest games this year came from these very same companies. Xbox was happy to spend millions advertising Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, The Elder Scrolls Online’s new expansion, and Call of Duty. But it wasn’t as willing to support the staff behind these and other games from its family of publishers, in a year with record layoffs across the industry. The Game Pass machine still demands more blood, you see, regardless of the state of the world.
Speaking of Game Pass, in 2024 Xbox’s video game subscription service received a lot of 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 besides day-one launches, Game Pass also added older games like the Resident Evil 2 remake, Control, Dead Island 2, and more to its library.
However, Xbox Game Pass isn’t quite the easy-to-recommend deal it was in past years. That’s because in July, Xbox announced big changes to Game Pass.
Previously, it was simple: you paid a monthly fee and got every new first-party Xbox game as well as some other releases. If you paid more, you got PC and streaming games, too.
But in the summer, Xbox announced a big price hike for all Xbox plans. Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, the plan that included everything, went from $17 to $20. Meanwhile, the console-only plan, which previously cost $11 a month, was being retired and replaced with a new “Game Pass Standard” tier that cost $15 a month and would no longer include day-one releases. Xbox explained that eventually some day-one releases would land on Standard, but didn’t specify a timetable.
To sum it up: Everyone is paying more for Game Pass, but not everyone gets access to big new games like Call of Duty Black Ops 6 at launch. Not great! For as long as Game Pass has been a thing, the promise of day-one first-party titles like Halo has been its big selling point. But in 2024, seemingly to help cover the cost of spending nearly $70 billion on Activision, Xbox has ruined what was once the best deal in gaming.
Maybe the weirdest Microsoft storyline that unfolded in 2024 is the way the company tried to navigate its dwindling console sales numbers while 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 again, Xbox sales were horrible compared to PlayStation and Nintendo in 2024. Reportedly, some publishers aren’t sure if they’ll continue releasing games on Xbox consoles due the small playerbase.
Xbox also began porting more of its games to other platforms, setting off a shitstorm among its most loyal cultists. Then you had Xbox’s odd marketing campaign that essentially told people: “Hey, you don’t need to buy an Xbox to play our games!” Meanwhile, upcoming games from Xbox-owned studios, like Doom: The Dark Ages and The Outer Worlds 2, will launch on PS5 in 2025. And according to Xbox, even Halo could one day arrive on a PlayStation. Oh, and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, that big Xbox-exclusive gem that launched in December, is charting a course to PS5 next year, despite Xbox boss Phil Spencer previously saying that 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’ll definitely do more consoles in the future, and other devices,” Spencer told Rolling Stone in November. The Xbox boss also claimed that the company is working on a Steam Deck-like handheld device, too. But that is years away, 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 games they already own via streaming without an Xbox console.
According to Xbox, the future definitely includes new consoles, but you won’t need 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.
As 2024 draws to a close, here is the reality of the situation: Xbox seems to be aimlessly moving forward 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 across more platforms in 2025 and beyond. It can’t seem to support all of these studios, however, and keeps closing them or laying people off.
Game Pass is now a questionable and expensive subscription plan that is a very shitty version of what we used to have, and which is only likely to get worse as Microsoft looks to keep numbers growing amid a lack of new users.
And if you’re looking to buy a new console, it almost seems like a gamble at this point to invest in an Xbox Series X/S. I’m not suggesting Microsoft will flip a switch and kill its consoles overnight. But as the company invests more and more into streaming and makes more of its exclusives multiplatform, there are fewer and fewer reasons to own an Xbox, whatever that even means in 2024.
2025 could also be a massive year for Xbox. It has new games coming from Bethesda, Activision, and its own many studios in the next few months, and will likely announce more as the year goes on. But 2024 was also a big year for Xbox; it’s just that the cost was massive job cuts, big price increases, and multiple studio closures. So while some Xbox fans might be excited for another big year, I’m truly concerned about how much more blood will be spilled to pay for it.
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