Halo Infinite will land on Game Pass at launch, with other first-party Xbox Series X games to follow

Halo Infinite
Halo Infinite (Image credit: 343 Industries)

What's new with Xbox Game Pass, you ask? Well, after a surprise slew of announcements from Microsoft on its next-gen Xbox Series X console – coming in late 2020 – we've got confirmation that its Xbox Game Pass subscription service will keep getting first-party titles from their launch dates, with Halo Infinite coming  on day one too.

The Xbox Game Pass service acts as a wide library of over 100 games to play on the Xbox One S or Xbox One X, and has been offering a brilliant selection of titles despite its relatively small selection of games compared to PS Now.

We already expected Halo Infinite – possibly the flagship title for the console as a whole, as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was for Nintendo Switch – to land on the service. It will join other first-party Xbox One games such as Gears 5 and The Outer Worlds (yes, Microsoft owns Obsidian now), as well as The Witcher III and numerous other big-name titles.

And we've now heard in no uncertain terms that other Xbox Series X games will keep up that tradition, meaning future Gears, Halo and Ori games – as well as whatever Microsoft-owned studios like Obsidian or Ninja Theory have in the pipeline, should be hitting Xbox Game Pass on day one too.

All-you-can-eat gaming

Subscription services like Xbox Game Pass or PS Now make increasing financial sense with the glut of titles being published these days – especially in a world of Netflix and Spotify where people are used to dipping in and out of media rather than committing to big one-off purchases, as the gaming industry seemingly still expects them to.

The Xbox Series X will have plenty of internal processing enhancements and neat software features to help elevate next-gen gaming machines from the consoles available today, but Microsoft will need to keep its foot on the accelerator with its add-on services too if it wants to build up the Xbox ecosystem to something truly massive.

Henry St Leger

Henry is a freelance technology journalist, and former News & Features Editor for TechRadar, where he specialized in home entertainment gadgets such as TVs, projectors, soundbars, and smart speakers. Other bylines include Edge, T3, iMore, GamesRadar, NBC News, Healthline, and The Times.