Game Pass continues to gain momentum, and it must be said that the year 2024 was particularly rich for subscribers. Rather than being satisfied with feelings and impressions, we have once again decided to summarize this year with figures, in particular by looking at the number of games published Day One in the service, the value in euros of titles added, the averages Metacritic, the availability times of games that have just left Game Pass, and finally the publishers who have supported the catalog the most this year.
It is important to clarify that we counted the additions of the Ultimate formula, and not just the Xbox Game Pass Core, the Xbox Game Pass Standard or the PC Game Pass.
Game Pass is still as rich and varied as ever
In 2024, 139 games have been added to the Game Pass catalog, including some exclusively to that of PC Game Pass, such as the recent Ara: History Untold. Overall, we always find this mix which means that everyone can find interesting games in the catalog, and sometimes even in genres that we are not used to playing.
Thus, “big” games such as STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl, Indiana Jones and the Ancient Circle, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 or Star Wars Jedi: Survivor rub shoulders with more modest productions such as Aliens: Dark Descent, Atlas Fallen , Lords of the Fallen, without forgetting independent titles like Dungeons of Hinterberg or Inscryption. In these 139 games, we included Genshin Impact and Warzone, as long as they are playable in the cloud, as well as productions that went to version 1.0, such as Phantom Abyss.
When we take a look at the publishers and developers who added the most games in 2024, we also note a fairly good balance between large publishers and small publishers. Electronic Arts was again the most prolific with 8 games added to Game Pass in 2024. It is followed by Activision, 505 Games and Focus Entertainment, with 6 games each.
Also note that we have counted 81 different publishers and developers who have integrated the Game Pass offer in 2024. In total, Xbox Game Studios, Activision, Blizzard and Bethesda have 15 entries into the Game Pass in 2024.
Are Game Pass games good?
In addition to offering a wide variety of genres, Game Pass can boast of being made up of good games. Indeed, we have gone through every title added in 2024 to the service, and the result is that the average score for Game Pass games is 78.35/100 on Metacritic. A score ultimately quite close to last year where the average was 77.60/100, we can therefore say that the quality of the games offered remains there.
To achieve this result, we selected the Xbox Metacritic scores, then PC if none were available on consoles. Here are the highest-rated Game Pass games joining the service in 2024:
- Resident Evil 2 – 93/100
- StarCraft II : Campaign Collection – 93/100
- Diablo IV – 91/100
- Neon White – 89/100
- Tales of Arise – 87/100
- Control Ultimate Edition – 87/100
- Botany Manor – 87/100
- Donut County – 87/100
- Persona 3 Reload – 86/100
- Star Wars Jedi : Survivor – 86/100
When we sort the distribution of games released in 2024 by rating, we notice that more than 43% of the games released were rated between 80 and 89 on Metacritic and that more than 43% of them were rated between 70 and 79. In total, more than 90% of the games in the catalog have a rating greater than or equal to 70, which is four points more than last year's selection.
More than €5,000 in games added in 2024
As you know, the price of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate has increased to €17.99 per month during 2024. It includes access to hundreds of games on console, PC and in the cloud, a subscription to EA Play, exclusive offers, and the possibility of playing online on consoles. Even if you can pay much less via the conversion trick, many agree that the price of the subscription is quite fair given the quality and quantity of games available.
By adding up the price of each game released in Game Pass in 2024, we calculated that the total value of the 2024 catalog was €5,272.23, while the public price of the Ultimate subscription comes to €215.88 for a year, and that's without counting the benefits to be recovered for free and the savings made thanks to offers on the Microsoft Store. In 2023, we had listed a catalog value of €5,095.31 at the end of the year. And this figure only counts games added to the catalog in 2024, so the total value of the subscription is much higher than that.
Certainly, promotions regularly apply to games and the price of a game when it is released sometimes drops quickly, but we can say that the offer is rather interesting in relation to its cost. Between big blockbusters and independent games, the average price of a 2024 Game Pass game is €37.93.
Lots of Game Pass Day One games in 2024!
The game catalog of the Game Pass subscription has continued to expand since the arrival of the service in June 2017, already seven years ago. Even today, the offer is so rich that few other services of the same type are able to compete from a quality/price point of view. And Microsoft has a major advantage: the release of its big games directly in Game Pass, the same day as in stores.
We counted: in 2024, 61 games were released on Xbox Game Pass and PC Game Pass at the same time as their commercial release. These are what Microsoft calls “Day One in Game Pass” releases. This is much less than last year and the 86 Day One releases.
To clarify our method, we simply counted each game as Day One as long as it was not available on Xbox before. This means that Octopath Traveler II, released on Xbox in 2024, is counted, even if it was released on other media before. Finally, we also counted early access releases towards a true version 1.0.
We counted 56 Xbox “Day One” entries in Xbox Game Pass and 60 PC “Day One” entries in PC Game Pass. For example, Ara: History Untold was released Day One in PC Game Pass, but is not available on Xbox.
How long does a game stay in Game Pass on average?
How long does a game stay in Game Pass? Do you know when this game will be removed? These questions often come up to us on the networks or the Xboxygen Discord. It's generally said that the chances are high that a game will stay in the service for about a year, but there are always exceptions.
- The game retired in 2024 and which remained the shortest in Game Pass is NBA 2K24. Arriving on March 11, 2024, it was withdrawn on August 31, a contract of less than 6 months to be offered in the Microsoft service. Last year, Sid Meier's Civilization VI had the shortest stay, just six months.
- On the contrary, the game that has remained the longest in the service before being withdrawn in 2024 is Forza Horizon 4. Arriving in Game Pass on October 2, 2018, it was withdrawn on December 15, 2024, more than six years later.
We have selected the durations of each of the games released from Game Pass in 2024, and we can say that on average, the games remained in Game Pass for 608 days, or around twenty months. The median is 543 days, which means that in volume terms, half of the games removed in 2024 remained shorter than that. Of the 139 games released in Game Pass in 2024, 5 games were removed the same year.
How many games have been added and removed from Game Pass in 2024?
This year, there are still 122 games removed from the service, we can therefore deduce that the Game Pass catalog continues to expand with a positive ratio in favor of entries. And with the recent acquisition of Activision Blizzard King and their numerous productions, it is already certain that the number of games added to the service by Microsoft will accelerate in the years to come.
This year, Microsoft offered no less than 15 games in Xbox Game Pass, more than half of which come from the Activision Blizzard catalog.
- Age of Mythology : Retold
- Ara : History Untold
- Call of Duty : Modern Wafare III
- Call of Duty : Warzone
- Call of Duty : Black Ops 6
- Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy
- Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled
- Diablo IV
- DOOM + DOOM II
- Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
- Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024
- Senua's Saga : Hellblade II
- Spyro Reignited Trilogy
- StarCraft II : Campaign Collection
- StarCraft : Remastered
This exclusive work on the numbers is only possible thanks to extensive monitoring of all the games that are added and removed from Game Pass throughout the year. We hope that these statistics shed more light on the quality of the service and the games offered there.
