Microsoft is bringing its first-party exclusives to Game Pass on release date

If you’re looking forward to trying out a slew of Microsoft’s newest releases and have a subscription to Xbox Game Pass, there’s some good news on the horizon.

If you’re looking forward to trying out a slew of Microsoft’s newest releases and have a subscription to Xbox Game Pass, there’s some good news on the horizon.

Microsoft is planning to debut all its Xbox One exclusive, first-party games via Xbox Game Pass now on release day. That means you can play games like Sea of Thieves or State of Decay 2 when they launch without having to pony up the cash for a full-priced game. 

That means for just $9.99 a month you can play the newest Xbox games to come to the platform the same day they come out. Microsoft is also working with stores such as GameStop to offer six-month Xbox Game Pass subscription cards for $59.99. So for the same price of a new release, you can have access to both new and old games that you can play as long as you want. 

The Xbox Game Pass service launched last year in June, and anyone with an active subscription can play one of the generous amount of games as long as they’d like. This all ends if you let the subscription lapse of course, but for $10 a month having access to a cache of games you may have missed out on as well as brand new things is a great deal.

Microsoft changes up the service and adds new games monthly too, and while older titles are shuffled out cyclically, you’ve got plenty of time to play through them before they’re removed. 

This is an interesting new frontier for Microsoft, which seems willing to trade game sales for $60 a pop for $9.99 a month subscriptions or the six-month and year-long subscription signups. If you were interested in trying out Sea of Thieves this March, though, you’re in luck.