PS5 and PC may have larger player bases than Xbox these days, but Xbox apparently still has the other platforms beat on one metric. According to a new report, Xbox users play more games than their PS5 and Steam counterparts–and it’s due to Game Pass.
Based on data collected by Ampere Analytics, Xbox users, on average, played almost six games each in August 2025. This is significantly more than Steam players (4.5 games on average) and PS5 players (3.7 games), and Ampere suggests that this finding is due to the Game Pass effect. In essence, enough Xbox players are Game Pass subscribers at this point that the ability to easily try out dozens of new games actually shows up in the data.
However, Ampere suggests that Xbox players are spending less overall time playing games compared to PS5 and Steam players. While this dynamic has often been true in the past, Ampere states that August 2025 was particularly unbalanced. Xbox users played only 7.7 hours of games on average, much lower than PS5 players (12.7 hours) and Steam players (11.9 hours).
It’s worth noting that these trends vary considerably over time as different game releases dominate certain months. The upcoming launch of Black Ops 7, for instance, will likely rebalance game time across the platforms, as Xbox users will receive it in Game Pass. Despite this variance, the general dynamic is quite resilient: Xbox users leverage Game Pass to sample far more games than players on other platforms, but they tend to spend less time gaming per month.
This report comes at an uncertain time for the Game Pass model. While Xbox has said that Game Pass will get the “largest investment” ever this year, there are other signs of discontent. Many developers have critiqued Game Pass’s effect on the industry, such as former PlayStation boss Shawn Layden, who said subscription models drive developers to become “wage slave[s].” Take-Two boss Strauss Zelnick questioned Game Pass’s benefits to the economics of game development, while former Xbox exec Shannon Loftis argued that Game Pass undermines retail revenue.
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