It’s been just over a year since Microsoft fractured its very good, very straightforward Game Pass subscription into a bunch of differently priced tiers that seemed designed to be as confusing as possible. The company is now throwing players who are subscribed to the cheapest Game Pass tiers a bone: increased access to PC and cloud gaming perks.
The company is experimenting with giving Game Pass Core ($10 a month) and Game Pass Standard ($15 a month) members limited access to certain games via the cloud and PC. Xbox Insiders can begin testing this initiative today, with a version of it seemingly planned to roll out to everyone in the not too distant future. The new benefit essentially adds cloud gaming support to all games in the Core (around 50 games) and Standard (over 400 games) libraries. It’ll also let players use cloud gaming for games they own that support the feature, something that was previously a benefit exclusive to Game Pass Ultimate.
Microsoft says it will also make PC versions of some Core and Standard games as well. So if you’re already playing a game on console like Grounded, you can switch to playing the PC version without needing to buy it. This is also neat, though a bit less impressive. Many of the Game Pass Core and Game Pass Standard game are already Play Anywhere titles, meaning buying them on console gets you the PC version and vice-versa, so there’s an argument to be made that the Game Pass versions should have worked the same way. Plus all of this is a raw deal when you consider Game Pass PC, which gives people who didn’t buy an Xbox Series X/S access to way more games, including day-one releases, at a much cheaper price than their console-playing peers.
Still, the latest Insider pilot program is the first step toward beginning to fill in many of these gaps as Microsoft tries to re-unify the gaming experience across different platforms. The Xbox Ally PC gaming handheld arrives in October with an Xbox-like OS layer, and the company’s next generation of hardware is expected to more closely resemble the openness of PC gaming. Of course, the biggest test of that vision lies in whether or not the company will be finally willing to do away with its requirement that console players pay to access multiplayer, a big component of why Game Pass is so expensive to begin with and one that doesn’t exist on PC.