What games come to Game Pass?

Read it first on my Substack

What games come to Game Pass? For developers, understanding the breakdown of the game library could be instructive for landing a lucrative deal. For gamers, knowing which games are coming down the pipeline could save a big chunk of money. Microsoft doesn’t make their selection criteria public in much detail, though.

In the absence of official data, what if we could model the typical Game Pass game, and predict which recent games will make their way to the service? We can break the problem down into two questions: What games are on Game Pass? And what games are most like those games?

Data collection

I collected the name of every game on PC Game Pass from Microsoft’s website — all 412 — then collected Steam data for 363 of them (genre, user tags, positive and negative review counts, Metacritic score, release date, and price). This gives us a pretty good snapshot of the Game Pass library.

What games are on Game Pass?

First, let’s break down the library by type. Steam provides two ways to do this, with its official genre classifications, and with user-generated tags. There are 11 genre classifications, and 353 user tags. Keep in mind that a game can have more than one of each.

Overall, there aren’t any surprises in the genre breakdown of the Game Pass library. Most games are action games, and almost half are classified as adventure. 38% are “indie”…