While it’s uncommon for Xbox Game Pass to go a month without at least something novel worth checking out, it certainly does happen it had its droughty spells in recent years. However, the second half of January quietly revealed a surprising number of chilly novel games coming to the Netflix-like subscription service, and in the process Thursday’s Xbox Developer DirectIt looks like 2025 will be one of the best years in the history of this service so far.
Beyond the occasional third-party blockbuster or a carefully curated selection of smaller indie games, the real promise of Game Pass has always hinged on Microsoft’s ability to provide a steady rhythm of high-quality first-party releases that always give paying subscribers something to play right now, as well as something they can expect just over the horizon. After years of promising that such a pipeline would be built, maybe it will finally happen.
Here’s what Game Pass Ultimate’s daily game release calendar will look like in 2025 (remember you need more pricey membership to access games at launch unless you’re on PC):
- The Lonely Mountain: Snowriders – January 21
- Ninja Gaiden 2 Black – January 23
- Eternal threads – January 28
- Orcs must die! A death trap – January 28
- Sniper Elite: Resistance – January 30
- Citizen Sleeper 2: Star Vector – January 31st
- Date everything – February 14
- Notorious – February 18
- The fall of the atom – Thursday, March 27
- Chiaroscuro: Expedition 33 – April 24
- South of north – April 8
- Doom: The Dark Ages – May 15
- Altera – Q1 2025
- Ninja Gaiden 4 – Fall 2025
- Medley – to be determined 2025
- Subnautics 2 – to be determined 2025
- Wuchang: Fallen feathers – to be determined 2025
- FBC: Firebreak – to be determined 2025
- Outer worlds 2 – to be determined 2025
- Fairy tale – to be determined 2025
- New Call of Duty – to be determined 2025
That’s an impressive list of games spanning many different genres and styles, and barring any unexpected delays, should keep your Game Pass library well-stocked for the next 12 months. And that’s before we factor in games whose release dates haven’t been announced yet, and games we already know are coming but whose Game Pass deals are still secret. We have no idea if Hollow Knight: Silk Song it will eventually hit sometime in 2025, for examplebut if it does happen, it has already been promised as a day one Game Pass release.
Last year, after Microsoft’s latest price augment and day one games being dropped from the basic subscription, I wrote about how Game Pass is a deal that keeps getting worse. Perhaps 2025 will be the year that Microsoft reverses this trend, ensuring quality and consistency with a massive novel publishing engine, along with a development timeline for this generation of games that finally come to fruition. Who knows whether this means Microsoft will be able to continue this trend, or whether it will prove to be a spectacular but isolated moment when the bill for an unsustainable economic model comes due?
In the meantime, at least Game Pass Ultimate and PC subscribers will be showered with plenty of (hopefully) chilly novel games.
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