You will have to fork out a lot for the expansion of the Game Pass library. Microsoft management came to such conclusions, according to a leaked internal correspondence that appeared on the website of the District Court of Northern California.
According to Axios, in a letter from Xbox Vice President Sarah Bond dated May 16, 2022, it is reported that third-party developers can request huge sums for publishing their future projects as part of a Game Pass subscription.
According to Bond:
Ubisoft would have asked around $100 million for the appearance of Assassin’s Creed Mirage in a subscription on the day of release (at that time the game was supposed to be released in early 2023 and, according to the top manager, it would be a bargain);
EA would have demanded much more for getting Star Wars Jedi Survivor into the library at the start of sales — in the region of $ 300 million (Bond considered that the game would have decorated a subscription, but the deal itself would not have been economically feasible);
getting into the Game Pass of such a blockbuster as Grand Theft Auto V would cost Microsoft $12-15 million per month (in July 2023, the game was released in the subscription service, but the terms of the deal were not officially disclosed).
Out of curiosity: the company believed that for getting Baldur’s Gate III into a subscription on the day of release, they would hardly ask for more than $ 5 million. The rights to release games such as Return to Monkey Island and Just Dance were valued at the same amount.
Bond’s letter with suggestions for improving the Game Pass library was written and sent after the head of Xbox, Phil Spencer, said in an internal correspondence in May 2022 that the company was faced with a “catastrophic situation” regarding its own game line.
The documents from the website of the District Court of Northern California have already disappeared. They ended up there, most likely by accident, as papers attached to a lawsuit between the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Microsoft. The first, recall, wants to block the purchase of Activision Blizzard.