2026's top Xbox games by new Game Pass players

There’s a lot going on at Xbox lately, and I’d wager Game Pass as we know it is about to get a serious shake-up. Xbox is sitting on a 3% accountability margin, and Game Pass is cannibalising first-party game revenue at exactly the moment these kinds of games are making bank on other platforms.

So before things inevitably change, let’s look at what subscribers are playing. Here are the Alinea estimates for the games that pulled the most new players via Game Pass so far this year.

Forza Horizon 6 takes pole position, naturally, with 6.8M Game Pass players this year across console, PC, and cloud, off the back of a hugely successful launch. It arrived day-and-date on Game Pass on April 19, with five days’ advance access for anyone who paid for the premium upgrade. Around 1.5M people did exactly that.

Forza Horizon 6‘s premium and Game Pass upgrade editions ran $120 and $60 respectively, up from Horizon 5‘s $100 and $40. To date, Forza Horizon 6 has generated $270M on Xbox alone (console, PC, and cloud) via copies sold and premium upgrade passes.

That’s a big number, but with those accountability margins we keep hearing about, there’s money being left on the table here. Our engagement metrics are the salt in the wound. Almost a month after launch, Forza is still commanding 2M players a day on Xbox alone, and over a fifth of its Xbox players have logged 50 hours or more.

Plenty of that cohort came in through Game Pass, which is the problem:

• These are the kinds of committed players who’d have happily bought the thing.

• New Xbox boss Asha Sharma has already pulled Call of Duty from Game Pass, and I’d expect the same treatment for the likes of Forza, Fallout, and other mega-franchises before long.

• It would sit squarely with the rhetoric in Sharma and Booty’s memo.

Subnautica 2, also a huge success and a day-one Game Pass arrival on 14 May, has drawn 3.5M players via the service. But our estimates have it at about 100K sold on Xbox, so the cannibalisation here is stark.

For contrast, Subnautica 2 has sold 5.4M copies and generated around $130M on Steam, where there’s no subscription siphoning off buyers.

Of those who played Subnautica 2 via Xbox, about 56% played for under five hours, more than double the equivalent share on Steam, which suggests a lot of Game Pass players bounced early.

Now, the honest counter to my whole cannibalisation rant is that most of those early-bouncers were never buyers. They tried Subnautica 2 because it cost ‘’nothing’’ and drifted off, so that’s reach (not lost revenue).

Fair enough. But our estimates show that a quarter of Xbox players put in over 15 hours, Those are committed players who might have paid for Subnautica 2, but they’re largely just accessing it through Game Pass instead – possibly including some who’d otherwise have bought it on Steam.

The rest of the ranking is where the revenue argument gets stronger. Two of these are third-party games where Xbox is paying for the privilege of cannibalising someone else’s sales:

• Escape the Backrooms, the co-op horror game based on the 4chan creepypasta, has had 2.8M new Game Pass players since it shadow-dropped on console on 28 May, nearly four years after its original off-console release. Smart timing, landing the day before A24’s Backrooms film hit cinemas (banging film, by the way). The two aren’t connected in story or production, but both draw on the same viral creepypasta, so the film’s marketing did the game a favour for free. But again, the cannibalisation pattern repeats, and hard. Escape the Backrooms has sold under 30K on Xbox (under $300K) versus almost 600K on PlayStation ($7.2M), where it isn’t on a sub. Fittingly for the horror premise, there’s a lot of cannibalisation going on here.

• NBA 2K26 joined Game Pass on 3 April, and around 1.4M new Xbox players have played it via the service since. Of those who played it on Xbox in April, 30% also played Fortnite that month, 29% Roblox, and 17% Madden 26, so this is the kids, families, and sports-fan crowd jumping in. Gotta get those Ultimate Team MyTEAM IAP numbers up, and some new players will help that loop.

  

• High on Life 2 launched day-and-date on Game Pass on 13 February, like the original, and has pulled 1.4M players since. It’s sold under 30K copies by our estimate. Around 87% of its players had previously played the first High on Life on Xbox, which hints that some of these are returning fans who might well have paid. The split with PlayStation is telling again: over 100K sold on PS5 ($6.3M) against just $1.4M on Xbox.

• Cyberpunk 2077 has drawn in 1.3M new Game Pass players since being added on 10 March. The timing for this one makes sense. The game was barely selling on Xbox by that point, over five years post-launch, so very little revenue was cannibalised. It also landed on PlayStation Plus Extra last July and remains there, where it’s since pulled 5.5M new players. For big, older AAA catalogue titles like this, that’s the future of subscription services in my view: not day-one launches that eat your sales, but back-catalogue depth that monetises games whose sales tail has mostly flattened.

The day-one launches at the top of this list pulled enormous audiences while leaving real money on the table, especially the third-party titles selling six to ten times better on PlayStation. The one unambiguously smart inclusion, Cyberpunk, worked precisely because it had nothing left to cannibalise.

That’s the line Microsoft has to walk now. Game Pass is brilliant at putting games in front of millions of people, and genuinely good for players. I know I’ve been getting damn-good use out of my subscription this year.

But at a 3% margin, with first-party tentpoles minting money at full price elsewhere, the math on giving those tentpoles away on day one gets harder every quarter. Pulling Call of Duty was the first move. It won’t be the last.

On that note…

• I had a chat with IGN about what’s happening with Xbox, and – as ever – I was quite candid. You can check out that interview – also featuring some analysts I look up to – right here.

• We’re off to Develop:Brighton this year, so if you’d like to check out our platform or discuss all things games, let us know! We’re also open to meeting for a coffee (Tobias, he’s Swedish) or a beer (me, I’m Welsh), so give us a shout!

• We’re offering a free trial of our platform for games companies. Send us a message here, and we’ll set you up.

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[Alinea Analytics boasts the most accurate PC and console estimates in the business. Game makers use our platform to understand their audience, keep an eye on the competition, monitor sales trends, and spot new opportunities. We equip game studios and financial institutions with accurate data and the confidence to make smarter, data-driven decisions. Want to talk about all things games market data? We’d love to chat!]