Which Game Pass tier is best value in 2024?

The price change to Microsoft’s Game Pass subscription and the introduction of a new tier (Standard), has generated considerable reaction across the internet. The omission of certain games that are in Ultimate (and Game Pass for Console, which is still live if you are an existing subscriber) has struck a nerve, as has the increased cost. But is the reaction fair?

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Contents

The basics – Game Pass tiers explained
The games – what’s missing from Game Pass Standard
More on Standard
Value for money – which tier’s best?
Final thoughts

Data captured October 8th 2024

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The basics – Game Pass tiers explained

First of all, for anyone unfamiliar, there are now four (plus one) Game Pass tiers. Which is arguably three too many, but here we go:

• Ultimate: Comes with everything: all first party releases (and some third party) on day one, cloud gaming, EA Play
• Standard: Comes with a curated selection of games, excluding day one releases (with the possible exception of very specific cases). No cloud play, no EA Play
• Core: A vastly reduced selection of games, no day one releases, no cloud play, no EA Play
• PC: Selected day one releases for PC (including all first party releases), all PC games that are also in Ultimate, EA Play included, no cloud play
• Console (legacy): Selected day one releases for console (including all first party), all console games that are also in Ultimate. No EA Play, no cloud play, no multiplayer – this tier is only available to people already subbed to it

Note: all tiers (except Console) now include online multiplayer.

There’s a few oddities you’ll see from looking at the info above. PC clearly offers the best feature set for the money, and a few weird things even Console did not: EA Play being the main one. Obviously PC gamers don’t have to pay for multiplayer, so that it makes it pretty feature complete (just lacking cloud play).

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The games – what’s missing from Game Pass Standard

Now to the good stuff. We’re going to focus on the games included in Ultimate or Console but NOT in Standard, as that’s the key change with the new system – Console has effectively been replaced by Standard, but instead of day one games you now get online multiplayer included. So just what’s involved in this sacrifice?

For the purpose of this analysis, we are not including EA Play titles, as they are not/were not included with Game Pass for Console.

• Around 42 games have been lost between Console & Standard
• The games missing have an average age of around 9 months
• They are overwhelmingly games that released day one on Game Pass, whether first party or third
• They have an average metascore of 79.5 – slightly higher than the Game Pass Ultimate average of 77.5
• They have an average Xbox review score (via Microsoft Store) of 3.6 – which is actually slightly lower than average
• 6 titles missing are from Xbox first party (we’re not including Overwatch 2 in this as it’s free)
• The next publisher in terms of number of games missing is Annapurna, with Neon White, Flock, and Open Roads all absent – the latter two were day one on Game Pass (note: Open Roads has since been re-added – see “More on Standard” below)

It’s clear from the games excluded that Microsoft have largely stuck to their guns in terms of removing day one games from that tier. It wasn’t immediately clear that first and third party day one games would skip Standard, but that seems to be mostly the case. You do, however, still get some newer releases on there, such as the DOOM + DOOM II release from August (though arguably that’s a special case with it being a retro game), as well as Atlas Fallen: Reign of Sand, Expeditions: A MudRunner Game, Brotato and Palworld.

The likes of Brotato and Palworld being included is perhaps surprising, given these are viral hits that still see strong player engagement.

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More on Standard

We’ve had our first batch of “new” games into the Standard tier as of October 2024, with MLB The Show 24 and Open Roads coming into this tier. MLB released in March 2024, so that’s a lean six month turnaround for that to come into Standard, while Open Roads released in February.

We probably can’t read too much into things at this stage as it’s still so early in the tier’s lifespan, but perhaps we can suggest that for third party games a six month delay before they show up in Standard may be likely

First party certainly seems longer, with Starfield and Forza Motorsport both still absent and now over a year old. Considering Forza’s tame performance in the Most Played charts, it’s a surprise that one is yet to move over and probably tells us something about the first party strategy for this tier.

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Value for money – which tier is best

Finally, we get down to the dirty business of it all. In working out which Game Pass tier offers the best value for money, we’re looking at three metrics:

• Age – we know the Standard tier should generally have older games on, but how does this compare across the board?
• Price – are the games generally full price releases or more budget-priced indies?
• Quality – using Metacritic and the Microsoft Store ratings to get an average

We’ll then take the monthly fee for each tier and work out what’s best. Of course, it primarily comes down to what you want from Game Pass, but it’s nonetheless interesting to look at in detail as the narrative is very much that gamers are being exploited by Microsoft here.

There’s a few clear takeaways from the analysis above:

• As mentioned earlier, PC appears the best tier at first glance. The highest value games (on average) plus more recent games for the lowest price bar Core. And it has EA Play!
• While Core has a very limited selection, they are the best games ranked by Metascore AND user reviews, though they are the oldest (not only lacking day one titles like the Standard tier, but also just missing slightly newer games that do find their way into Standard). Despite this, Core isn’t simply packed with Xbox 360 games – in fact, it has very few. They do appear to be a quite carefully curated selection of primarily Xbox One-era games
• Ultimate of course contains Console and PC games, which gives it a bit of a deceptive value proposition. The 538 games and $12k value sound impressive, but if you’re a console only gamer that wants day one games, you’re actually only getting an extra 40 games compared to Standard for your money

The elephant in the room in terms of value is, of course, the addition of online multiplayer as part of switch from Console to Standard in exchange for day one games. PC doesn’t have this problem (with multiplayer always free), which is how it’s able to be the cheapest tier other than Core

Arguably, in order to calculate the true value we need to put a price on online multiplayer before calculating the price per game.

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When ignoring the fact that multiplayer is bundled in with the other tiers, PC Game Pass is by far best value in the new structure, as expected. If you happen to still be subbed to the Console tier, that’s as good as identical to PC in terms of value – PC at $0.026 and Console at $0.027 per game. A common argument is that Microsoft favour PC gamers with their Game Pass pricing structure, but if you look at the Console tier pricing it seems more like they just have a price they put on console multiplayer gaming.

The fact that PC and Console tiers have been so similar in terms of value indicates that there isn’t an inherent bias towards PC going on.

At the other end of the spectrum, Core is by far the worst value when the inclusion of multiplayer is not factored in – you’re paying an incredible 453% more per game compared to the Standard tier. Meanwhile, when looking at Standard vs Console, which is in our interest considering the recent changes, Standard is 57% more expensive per game than Console. But, again, crucially, it has multiplayer.

With that in mind and to make things fair, we’ve added a metric where we make an assumption that online multiplayer is worth $9.99 per month. This is the price that Xbox Live Gold was, and of course is the price of Game Pass Core now. Once this is factored into the value proposition, things change considerably.

All of a sudden, PC and Console are the worst value per game, with Ultimate dropping down below 2 cents ($0.019) and Standard actually becoming the best value* at $0.014 per game.

When considered like this, the Console tier is 92% more expensive per game than Standard. However, it is still only 3 cents per game, so these are very fine margins (*Core is actually the best value when considered in these terms, as you are sort of of getting 44 games for free with your online multiplayer).

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Final thoughts

There has been a lot of vitriol around the recent changes to Game Pass, particularly some angst at Microsoft pushing gamers into the Ultimate tier for day one games, and forcing multiplayer onto people who may not want it.

We don’t have performance data for these tiers. This means we can’t make any concrete statements about whether the tier changes were due to underperformance by the Console tier, or because Microsoft wanted to force people into Ultimate for access to Black Ops 6. Certainly the latter seems most likely. While we can be angry about that, and indeed frustrated about the price hike (as well as being continually baffled by the complexity of the tier system) there don’t seem to be grounds to be annoyed any one tier is particularly better value than another.

The Game Pass tiers are surprisingly close in terms of value when looking at price per game, as well as quality and recency. It really is a case of having to make the right choice for yourself, based on what you can afford and the features you need (particularly with regards to Cloud play)

Parity of features between PC and console players is a warranted concern, with PC having day one games AND EA Play, which Standard does not – but we have to view this as the trade off required for multiplayer being bundled in. We also mustn’t forget that all existing Console tier players (with day one games but not EA Play), will continue to receive everything they’re used to until they cancel their subscriptions – a move Microsoft didn’t necessarily have to make. If that changes, we can start asking questions.

The arrival of Black Ops 6 is a watershed moment for Game Pass. If the numbers don't increase significantly enough as a result we should expect to see further changes before long. We'll be tracking the metrics outlined in this article to ensure the service doesn't get watered down, or to see how much it improves going forward (let's hope)

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Some notes on this data: You may notice that Xbox are very vague when talking about the number of games in Game Pass tiers. Core is just “more than 20”, Ultimate is “hundreds”. In the figures above we have only counted a game once where there are multiple editions available in a particular tier EXCEPT where there is a compelling reason to treat them differently e.g. a classic version and a remaster (as an example, we have counted Mass Effect 1, 2 and 3 separately, and also the Mass Effect Legendary Edition as a distinct game.

In most cases, however, multiple versions have been de-duped. One other thing to note, in Ultimate where console and PC versions sometimes have their own version, we have again only counted each specific game once. 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 October 8th 2024.