Xbox Game Pass adds 50 games including Yakuza and (almost) every Final Fantasy

Xbox revealed at today’s X019 show that it was adding several new games to the library of Game Pass — including at least one series that’d previously been PlayStation-exclusive.

Game Pass is perhaps Microsoft’s biggest weapon in the ongoing arms race against the other consoles. It’s just a darned good value, and it seems like the company is tripping over itself to add more and more games to Game Pass’s vault. Today, it revealed it’s adding 50 new games to the service, including big titles like The Witcher 3, Tekken 7, and Rage 2. You can see the complete list here.

Perhaps the biggest coup yet for Game Pass is the Yakuza series. These quirky action games-cum-Japanese epics were previously Sony-exclusive. I don’t know what Microsoft offered publisher SEGA to get them to the Xbox, but I’m happy, because everyone should play at least one Yakuza game. Of course, it won’t be releasing every game — just Yakuza 0, Yakuza Kiwami, and Yakuza 2 Kiwami. Still, those are all excellent games, and it sets the stage for later remakes/remasters to be ported over as well.

The company is also getting every main-series Final Fantasy game made since FFVII (except XI and XIV), which is probably part of Square Enix’s efforts to resell its old classics (see also: the Switch getting a crapton of Final Fantasy). A lot of these were already playable on Xbox One via the console’s backwards compatibility, but it’s still a big haul to add. On a similar note, the two current-gen Kingdom Hearts games that weren’t already available on Xbox One — Kingdom Hearts 1.5 + 2.5 ReMix and Kingdom Hearts HD 2.8 Final Chapter Prologue — will be coming to Xbox One, but not through Game Pass. They’re available to buy now on the Microsoft Store.

Just to make it even more appealing, the company’s also adding a number of non-game goodies to Game Pass Ultimate, including one month of EA Access, three months of Discord Nitro, and six months of Spotify Premium.

Microsoft revealed a number of other things at this year’s event, including that it’d be adding 50 new games to its Project xCloud streaming service, which will also be coming to PCs next year — curiously, the company specifically said xCloud will support the Dualshock 4 controller at some point, so maybe this is more of that curious truce Sony and Microsoft seemed to have formed. Also, PC users will soon have the option to remote install games from the Game Pass app, eliminating a potential headache for those who use the service primarily on their computers.