Game Pass December 2024 – Review

It's been a busy year for Game Pass, with the year coming to a close in the same style - another blockbuster release from Xbox first party. But how was the month as a whole?

To see last month’s review click here. In November, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 and Flight Sim both launched to reasonable levels of acclaim, albeit tarnished somewhat by poor launches with glitches and server problems. We were all hoping that with Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Microsoft would finally have a Game Pass first party release it could rely on (discounting Black Ops 6).

December 2024 – The Additions

As mentioned, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle was the headline-grabber for December, backed up by the unexpected release of Crash Team Racing Nitro Fuelled.

Critical Reception

For the first time in ages, a Xbox first party game launched to pretty much universal critical acclaim. While Black Ops 6 hit the heights of a 83 Metascore, it also launched on PlayStation 5 and, let’s face it, we knew what to expect from it. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle was another step up, however, reaching an 86 Metascore and excellent user scores of 4.4. From the rest, another three games have Metascores over 80, with Crash Team Racing Nitro Fuelled at 83, WRC at 80 and Wildfrost at 80.

As you can see from the table below, the average Metascore of the new additions was 81, by far the highest since we’ve been doing these reviews and significantly above the Game Pass average.

Recency

As well as being highly rated, this was one of the freshest months in terms of the recency of games added, at just over a year old on average. 4 of the 7 games were day one releases (Indiana Jones, Wildfrost, Overthrown and For the King II), while Hunt: Showdown 1896 was just four months old.

December 2024 – The Leavers

While there were fewer games leaving this month than in November (when 15 left), arguably there are some much bigger titles that left this time around. Forza Horizon 4 is undoubtedly the biggest one to go, having previously been the best rated Game Pass game on the service. Other big misses were Rise of the Tomb Raider, The Quarry and LEGO 2K Drive.

Additions vs Leavers

Once again, mirroring the past few months, more games left Game Pass than joined it in December. In fact, it was one of the quietest months in general for Game Pass additions. Overall though, despite the quantity issue, there was a huge uptick in the quality of the games joining (as defined by Metacritic, at least – the average Xbox store rating for the games was actually lower than the games leaving).

Conclusions

With pretty much the only notable addition this month being Indiana Jones and the Great Circle (sorry Crash Team Racing, but I don’t think we can put too much emphasis on historical Activision titles that should be on the service already), it was certainly a lean month. Luckily for Microsoft, Indiana Jones was fantastic.

December is always a quiet month for Game Pass and 2024 was no exception. One of the best first party additions in years saves it.

Some notes on this data: We are only interested in the Game Pass Ultimate tier for this. We may expand to look at other tiers in the future. For the purposes of this exercise, where the console or PC version of a game is already on Game Pass and the other version also joins, we do not count it as an additional game coming to the service. In the same way, if only one version leaves, we don’t count it as a departure. Prices and review scores listed is the data as of the date listed below, meaning the prices & scores of games from the year previously (when used in point of comparison in this article), are likely to be cheaper than they would have been when they actually joined Game Pass and may have different average scores (especially user scores).

For Metacritic scores, we generally take the score from the platform with the most reviews, unless there is a reason not to (e.g. instead of taking Goldeneye 64’s 96 Metacritic score for the recent Xbox re-release, we opt to not give it a score as there are not enough reviews of that version). Data captured January 5th 2025.