Xbox Game Pass Ultimate is an all-you-can-play video game subscription service with exceptional value. It has evolved far beyond its Xbox-bound origins to become a subscription that delivers something for everyone who plays games, and now encompasses console and PC game downloads, access to online multiplayer services, a deal with gaming giant EA and a cloud-based service that streams games to nearly any device. It also delivers a lot of Day One launch games from Microsoft's own studios.
Finding the right version of Game Pass can be confusing. Microsoft offers several versions, but because of how the features are sliced up between them, only the $15-per-month Ultimate plan, which we'll shorten here to XGPU, with all the benefits detailed above, really makes any sense.
It's that collection of features, for less than the cost of a 4K Netflix subscription, which earns Game Pass Ultimate an Editors' Choice Award for 2021.
Pick the right plan
Plain old Game Pass is $10 per month, and just includes a library of games from famous to obscure, that you can download and play on Xbox One or Xbox Series X and Series S consoles. As with all these subscriptions, games enter and leave the library regularly due to licensing deals, but Microsoft staples such as Halo and Forza are usually permanent. Even when a game leaves the library, though, you can transfer your progress to another storefront like Steam -- not easily, but you can do it.
If you want to play games with online multiplayer, in most cases you'll need a separate $10 per month Xbox Live subscription to play online against other people. That's included in the Ultimate package, so you can already see why that's the plan Microsoft is really pushing you toward.
Note that free-to-play games, like Fortnite, don't require an Xbox Live subscription for multiplayer.
The $10 per month Game Pass for PC plan uses a Windows-only Xbox app to download and install a subset of games from the full Game Pass library to run locally rather than stream. As these are full PC games, you'll need a gaming laptop or desktop with a graphics card and a powerful-enough processor, plus a lot of hard drive space, to use it. Game Pass for PC also includes EA Play, a subscription that on its own costs $5 a month or $30 a year.
But the best value lies in the Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription. For $15 per month, you get both the console and PC game libraries, EA Play's perks and discounts, as well as Xbox Gold -- $10 a month on its own -- which focuses on online multiplayer games. To top it all off, you can play on phones, iPads or even a Mac by using Xbox Cloud Gaming. For anyone who enjoys both console and PC gaming, you'd be hard-pressed to find a better deal, especially if cloud gaming continues to become a bigger part of the mix.
Action-adventure games and shooter series like Battlefield, Destiny 2, Gears of War and Halo make up a majority of the service's catalog of about 400 games. By our count, action/adventure games made up 30% of the titles on Game Pass, with shooters accounting for another 15%. RPGs and sports titles also had a decent showing, but horror fans and puzzle aficionados will find a smaller selection (about 5% of the library). Still, Game Pass offers access to classic platformers like Banjo Kazooie, matching and puzzle games, RPGs and unique indie games such as Twelve Minutes and Hades.
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