Back during the early days of Xbox Game Pass, Microsoft had expressed its hopes for the game subscription service to grow into a major player across all of entertainment, wanting the platform to one day reach as many as 100 million subscribers. In the years since, not only has the industry changed in many ways, but so too has Game Pass itself. Even so, it appears as though the service is struggling to break past its ceiling – with Game Pass reportedly still stuck at around 30 million subscribers.

In a report by The Wall Street Journal (paywalled) discussing Microsoft’s recent Xbox shake-ups, the publication revealed that the console maker had “projected Game Pass subscriptions would reach around 77 million this year”. Unfortunately for Xbox, they are far from reaching this goal, with the publication reporting that Game Pass “currently has about 30 million, a person familiar with the matter said.”

For some context, Microsoft announced back in early 2022 that Game Pass had reached 25 million subscribers. Two years later, the company revealed that the figure had jumped to 34 million subscribers.

While initially seen as a solid amount of growth, this increase came in the wake of Microsoft’s Game Pass overhaul – in which previous Xbox Live Gold members were transitioned over to Game Pass.

Since then, Microsoft made further changes to Game Pass: Hiked up its price massively (losing millions of subscribers in the meantime); added Call of Duty; removed Call of Duty and brought prices back down slightly.

While it is safe to assume that Xbox will likely never reach its 100 million Game Pass subscriber maker, CEO Asha Sharma has recently expressed even more ambitious goals – wanting Xbox to one day have over 1 Billion daily active users. We will have to wait and see whether either of these pipe-dreams come true.

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KitGuru says: What do you think of Game Pass in 2026? Has it run its course? Will the service ever grow to 100 million subscribers? Let us know down below.

While the most recent entry in the series has been mired with plenty of controversies, the Monster Hunter franchise has had a huge resurgence over the past 10 or so years thanks in part to the explosive success of 2018’s Monster Hunter World. Already Capcom’s best-selling game of all time, the co-op focused action-RPG has now reached a new milestone – officially selling over 30 million units.

Taking to Twitter to make the announcement, the official Monster Hunter page confirmed that: “Monster Hunter: World has reached a combined 30 million units sold! A massive thank you to all of you, our faithful pards!”

The ‘combined’ sales in which they are referring to brings together both the sales of the base game as well as units sold via the ‘Monster Hunter World: Iceborne Master Edition’ – which included both base game and its expansion. For context, Iceborne alone sold over 16 million units, making the expansion Capcom’s 5th best-selling ‘game’ of all time.

While Resident Evil 2’s remake will likely surpass it soon, Capcom’s second best-selling game of all time is another Monster Hunter – Rise – currently sitting at 18.6 million. Similar to World, its ‘Sunbreak’ expansion is also a Capcom best-seller at 11.3 million units sold.

Last and also least, the most recent entry in the series, Monster Hunter Wilds, continues to see relatively slow sales following its explosive launch, currently landing at 11.4 million

Regardless of which game is right at the top, it is quite clear that by this point Monster Hunter is one of Capcom’s biggest franchises. It will be interesting to see what the team have planned for Wilds and beyond – and whether any future title will manage to reach the heights of MH: World.

KitGuru says: What do you think of MH: World so many years later? Is it aging better than Wilds? Between these two and MH: Rise, which entry is your favourite? Let us know down below.