Free-to-play games often don’t get popular fast enough to support studios, while buy-to-play multiplayer games have a high cost of entry for groups of friends that may not all enjoy it. Game Pass is a phenomenal service for smaller multiplayer games because the service is a great middle ground between two highly risky monetization models. Failing to offer crossplay should be a rare exception that developers are apologetic about as they rush to make it happen, but it feels like most Game Pass releases outside of major triple-As don’t have it at launch. For multiplayer games, Game Pass is best used as a demo service to try things out before buying them on Steam where you know you’ll always be able to play with your friends. The lack of crossplay, and in particular PC crossplay - which should never be treated like multiple platforms - is hurting Game Pass. No one wants to invest time progressing in a game only to have to restart when Microsoft arbitrarily removes it from Game Pass someday, so to be safe we just play on Steam. There’s also a peace of mind of knowing once we buy it it will always be there, unlike Game Pass, which frequently rotates games off the service.

For one thing, it’s just nice to have all of your games in one library, and we’ve been building our Steam libraries for decades. Every time a new multiplayer game comes out, we have to collectively decide if we’re going to play it on Game Pass or buy it on Steam, and Steam consistently wins out for a few reasons.

This lack of PC crossplay among Game Pass titles is frequently affecting my friend group. Related: Pentiment Dev Says It Wouldn't Even Have Been Pitched Without Game Pass Many games have had this exact same problem, including Back 4 Blood, Lemnis Gate, Dark Alliance, The Ascent, Human Fall Flat, Gunfire Reborn, and many, many more. Darktide does not support PC crossplay, meaning if I’m playing on PC through Game Pass while my friends purchased it through Steam, we cannot play together. The most recent game to whiff on crossplay is Darktide, a Left 4 Dead-style co-op shooter from the Vermintide 2 team - one of my favorite multiplayer games.

Steam game pass