Xbox’s chief financial officer Tim Stuart recently told attendees at the Wells Fargo TMT Summit that the company wants to bring Game Pass“to every screen that can play a game”.
One potential method of expanding the service’s reach that he floated included offering ad-supported game streaming to players in emerging markets.
“For models like Africa, or India, Southeast Asia, maybe places that aren’t console-first, you can say, ‘hey, do you want to watch 30 seconds of an ad and then get two hours of game streaming?’
“Africa is, you know, 50% of the population is 23 years old or younger with a growing disposable income base, all with cell phones and mobile devices, not a lot of high-end disposable income, generally-speaking.
“So, we can go in with our own business models and say — there’s millions of gamers we would never have been able to address, and now we can go in with our business models.”
Windows Centralalso claims to have viewed evidence that such a business model could be reaching a production stage ahead of its possible introduction next year.
Security researcherTitle_OSis reported to have recently shared code snippets from the Xbox OS that referenced offering 15-minute blocks of Game Pass access on an “Earned Time” basis.
It was also claimed last year thatMicrosofthad been surveying players about the possibility ofintroducing a cheaper, ad-supported tier of Xbox Game Pass.
