Shortly after Microsoft announced a partnership with Discord to offer Game Pass benefits as part of the latter’s Nitro subscription, a new feature for the service has seemingly been discovered. According to Windows Central’s Jez Corden, this feature, dubbed Project Saluki, has been designed with the goal of targeting the Chinese market in particular, and will include several tiers of Game Pass and their associated benefits. China needing its own unique version of the subscription service comes down to the fact that Microsoft has to meet the unique regulatory demands of the country.
While no details about Project Saluki have been revealed, Corden posits that it might start offering games through the subscription service that have been officially verified by China’s regulatory bodies. Along with this, keeping in line with the kinds of games that have seen success in the region, there is also expected to be a larger emphasis on in-game currencies and other forms of microtransactions.
As for the rest of the world, Xbox is also seemingly working on a new feature codenamed Positron. While details are scarce, there are indications that it might be Microsoft’s way to offer digital copies of games that players already own physical copies of. As the report notes, this could be a larger push for Xbox to go all-in on digital games only. Currently, the company only offers digital-only options through the Xbox Series S, with the larger and more powerful Xbox Series X still including a disc drive.
Xbox’s desire to go fully digital might come down to the fact that Microsoft isn’t part of the Blu-Ray consortium, and because of this, it has to pay licensing costs to make use of the technology for its disc drives. Sony, on the other hand, is a member of the consortium and is able to include Blu-Ray disc drives in its consoles without having to pay licensing costs.
Microsoft’s desire to lean more heavily into digital-only games might also come down to the fact that it has been focusing quite a bit of its effort on pushing Game Pass as one of its main consumer-facing services. This report, alongside the company’s other moves, might indicate that the next-generation console, Project Helix, might not offer any SKUs with disc drives at all, and the company will instead go all-in on digital. Interestingly, the company’s other major source of gaming income—gaming PCs—has seen disc drives essentially disappear over the last decade with the rise of Steam, with even modern PC cabinets lacking any room for an internal disc drive.
A recent report had indicated that Xbox has been exploring a number of new options for Game Pass. Among these is a “pick your own plan” option that would allow subscribers to opt out of services typically part of Game Pass that they might not use. This would include things like Minecraft Realms or Fortnite Crew. The idea would also open up new ways for the company to bundle its subscription costs, like including World of Warcraft play time as part of Game Pass, for instance.
Another rumored new plan for Game Pass involves a brand new tier that only includes first-party games published under the Xbox Game Studios umbrella. Datamines have indicated that this would include titles like DOOM Eternal and Grounded, among many others.
