Phil Spencer confirms that we won’t see Game Pass on the Nintendo Switch

Game Pass is Microsoft’s trump card going into the next generation. Sure, their console is wickedly powerful and they’ve just bought up a whole load of studios to develop first-party games but Game Pass? Man, you just can’t beat that kind of deal. Why pay all that money for next-gen games when you could just pay a subscription to access a massive library of old and new titles? If you’re not a stickler for ownership, it almost seems like a deal too good to pass up. Like, if Phil Spencer came up to you in the street, pulled open a trenchcoat and revealed a massive collection of games for the price that Game Pass is going for these days, you’d be convinced it was undoubtedly a scam. The hopes that such a system would ever make its way to other systems…well, it’s something we can’t really let go of despite Phil Spencer being very clear on the subject.

Speaking to German website Game Star, Phil Spencer had some words to share about the possibility of Game Pass coming to the Nintendo Switch and other consoles. “The thing about other gaming console platforms is we’re not able to bring a full Xbox experience on those platforms,” Spencer said.

In places where we have brought Xbox, like mobile phones like we’re doing now with Project xCloud with Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, what we’ve done with PC with bringing our full Xbox experience there. We know when somebody is playing one of our Xbox games there is an expectation that they’ve got their Xbox LIVE community, they have their achievements, Game Pass is an option for me, my first-party library is completely there.

Which is basically a way of saying, “We got a great thing going on here, ya’ll can jog on”. Besides which, I highly doubt Sony and Nintendo would be keen on having Xbox branding and services all over their consoles, especially when they could just follow Game Pass back to Microsoft’s hardware and engrain themselves in the already established ecosystem.

Last Updated: July 21, 2020