An Xbox Wire blog post today has confirmed good news to the PC gaming community. PC Game Pass countries are being expanded and is now available in a wide variety of Eastern and Western nations, bringing the total count to 86. It should be noted that this is for games to be played locally on PC, and does NOT include Cloud gaming, which is still only available in a handful of countries.
New Countries:
- Albania
- Algeria
- Bahrain
- Bolivia
- Bosnia and Herzegovina
- Bulgaria
- Costa Rica
- Croatia
- Cyprus
- Ecuador
- Egypt
- El Salvador
- Estonia
- Georgia
- Guatemala
- Honduras
- Iceland
- Kuwait
- Latvia
- Libya
- Liechtenstein
- Lithuania
- Luxembourg
- Malta
- Moldova
- Montenegro
- Morocco
- Nicaragua
- North Macedonia
- Oman
- Panama
- Paraguay
- Peru
- Qatar
- Romania
- Serbia
- Slovenia
- Tunisia
- Ukraine
- Uruguay
This is good news with bad timing
Regarding cloud gaming and its expansion, It would be a safe bet that these countries are under consideration for cloud gaming expansion. Phil Spencer alluded to this idea in his WSJ interview back in October 2022, where he mentioned that developing markets would be a key part of its growth. It’s a safe bet, however, that Microsoft will hold off on that expansion until the Activision Blizzard deal comes to a conclusion. Right now, regulators aren’t spending much of their attention on cloud gaming as a part of the games industry. Introducing that idea would put Microsoft at a clear advantage over their console competitors, Sony and Nintendo. As Microsoft continues to grow their Xbox division, they are going to be relying on the cloud to make gaming accessible where consoles are not as affordable.
Now that the Game Pass countries list grows to a size larger than its competitors, Microsoft already threatens to attract attention to these plans. One only needs to open the Xbox app to find cloud gaming as an option. While this expansion is to be celebrated by fans, Microsoft may have been wrong to announce this before the second half of the year, when shareholders will be far more concerned about the health of Microsoft’s gaming division.
