Ready for some more games?
With a new year comes new regular additions to Xbox Game Pass, Microsoft's gaming subscription service that's split into different tiers to suit various price ranges and needs. 2025 is kicking off with a bunch of games being added to the Standard tier, as shared via Xbox Wire on Tuesday.
Standard subscribers will soon be able to play a few games that were already in the Ultimate tier, including open-world mech farming game Lightyear Frontier, which is currently in Game Preview. Meanwhile, Ultimate subscribers can look forward to games like EA Sports UFC 5, as well as the original Diablo from Blizzard Entertainment, though the latter is only available on PC.
Below, you'll find the full list of games coming to different tiers of the service:
January 7
- Road 96 (Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One Xbox Cloud Gaming, Windows PC) - Ultimate, Standard, PC
January 8
- Lightyear Frontier (Xbox Series X|S) - Standard
- My Time at Sandrock (Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One) - Standard
- Robin Hood - Sherwood Builders (Xbox Series X|S) - Standard
- Rolling Hills (Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One) - Standard
January 14
- EA Sports UFC 5 (Xbox Series X|S, Xbox Cloud Gaming) - Ultimate
- Diablo (Windows PC) - Ultimate, PC
What's leaving Xbox Game Pass on January 15?
As usual, there's a few games that are slated to leave the Xbox Game Pass lineup fairly soon. If you want to keep playing these titles, you'll need to buy them. Remember that you get a discount on anything you buy while it's still in the Game Pass library, so act fact and you'll save some money.
- Common’Hood
- Escape Academy
- Exoprimal
- Figment
- Insurgency Sandstorm
- Those Who Remain
Another Blizzard game is nice, but it's a slow start to the year
It's really cool to see the original Diablo added to the PC Game Pass lineup. In addition to continuing the trend of slowly but steadily seeing more Activision Blizzard games in Game Pass, it's just an important piece of gaming history. Diablo 2 is obviously where the franchise exploded in widespread acclaim and sales, but that wouldn't have been possible without the foundation Diablo provided.
That said, this is otherwise a very subdued way to start off Game Pass in 2025. Most of the additions here are just titles that have been available in Ultimate and PC Game Pass making their way to the Standard tier.
Hopefully the next couple of months will bring some more interesting games for everyone to play. Microsoft has multiple big first-party games that are currently slated to arrive this year, including Compulsion Games' South of Midnight and id Software's DOOM: The Dark Ages. Ideally, we should be hearing about some release dates before too long.
I'm also still curious what's going on with all the different Call of Duty games being added to the Microsoft Store, a trend that's been going on for months now. That's another front where we need to learn more sooner rather than later.
