Players are digging into Xbox Game Pass now that the company has officially launched its new Xbox Game Pass Standard tier. However, they’ve discovered that it’s missing quite a few noteworthy titles, including some that were already on the service before Xbox switched to its new payment structure.
Xbox published a post on September 10 marking the move, and explaining its new Game Pass plans in a succinct manner. Want to just use your Xbox for multiplayer? Grab Game Pass Core. Just want games on your PC? Get PC Game Pass. Game Pass Standard, arguably the most confusing new tier of the bunch when it was announced back in July, is for people who want to “level up [their] Xbox console gaming experience at a great value.” It costs $15 per month compared to Ultimate’s $20 per month (up from $17).
With the launch comes a retooled online catalog, which users have been using to see what’s missing on Standard (via Kotaku). If you go to the Xbox website, you can sort games by membership. If you click on Game Pass Standard, you’ll see that it features 370 games at the time of this writing, compared to Ultimate’s 508.
This was expected, since Xbox said only its Ultimate tier would be getting day-one launches, although an Xbox spokesperson confirmed to Digital Trends that existing Game Pass for Console players will receive day-one games if they keep their subscriptions. Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, out in November, is only coming to Ultimate, Game Pass for Console, and PC Game Pass, for example. However, Standard is missing some first-party titles that are already out. That includes recent releases like Starfield, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Diablo 4, Forza Motorsport, Valorant, and Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2. There are still some first-party titles on Standard, of course, like Minecraft and spinoffs, Pentiment, Prey, the Dishonored games, and Psychonauts games.
However, third-party titles that were added to the service over the past couple of months aren’t available: Age of Mythology: Retold, Still Wakes the Deep, Star Trucker, and Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn, just to name a few. (There’s a handy list on the Xbox subreddit that shows what games are missing, although it’s not complete.)
Xbox hasn’t made it clear how long it will take day-one launches on Ultimate to make it to the Standard tier, only noting that they might be added to Standard “up to 12 months late or more.” Since the subscription tiers have changed over, players should also note that cloud gaming is only available on the Ultimate tier.
