Microsoft plans to bring Xbox Game Pass to PC

In a quarterly earnings report on Wednesday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella mentioned plans to bring the subscription service Xbox Game Pass to the PC. For $10 per month, Xbox console players get access to a library of more than 200 new and old games: the selection includes some big Microsoft exclusives, like Forza Horizon 4 and Sea of Thieves, as well as indies and third party games like Rocket League and Fallout 4. As long as you pay for the subscription, you can play as many of them as you want.

"Bringing Game Pass to even the PC is going to be a big element of [increasing the strength of our gaming community]," Nadella said in the earnings conference call.

Existing Game Pass subscribers can, in a way, already play those games on their PCs. "Play Anywhere" games that are part of Game Pass can be played on Windows 10 as well, if you brave the Microsoft Store to get them. But that's a limited selection of the total Game Pass library, largely made up of Microsoft's own games.

Nadella didn't detail what bringing Game Pass to PC will entail, but my pie-in-the-sky hope is that it includes PC emulation of Game Pass's backwards compatible selection, like Ninja Gaiden Black.

Wes Fenlon
Senior Editor

Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.


When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).