Nintendo Switch Online vs Game Pass: subscriber numbers alone don’t tell the full story

According to Nintendo’s latest financial reports and local coverage, tens of millions of players are subscribed to Nintendo Switch Online, while growth on Microsoft’s Game Pass side has clearly slowed compared to its early boom years. On the surface it can look like the “family-friendly Nintendo” is simply outmuscling Xbox’s subscription model in raw numbers – but once you dig into the details and context behind those figures, things get a lot more nuanced.

Nintendo Switch Online launched in 2018 with a fairly modest package: access to online multiplayer, cloud saves and a library of classic NES and SNES titles. Over time this was expanded with the Expansion Pack tier, adding Nintendo 64 and Mega Drive / Genesis games plus big DLC add-ons for hit titles like Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. The strategy is simple and low-friction: keep it cheap and bundle-like. There’s an individual plan and a very attractive family plan, so with a hardware base well over 100 million Switch consoles, a huge slice of owners eventually say “why not” and subscribe – especially because you need NSO for most online multiplayer anyway.

Xbox Game Pass, by contrast, is built as a much more aggressive, content-heavy service: day-one access to first-party releases, a large rotating catalogue of third-party games, PC and console support, and an Ultimate tier with cloud gaming. The monthly price is significantly higher, but you’re getting full-price games as part of the deal. The last time Microsoft openly talked about numbers, Game Pass sat in the mid–tens of millions range; since then it has avoided giving new raw subscriber figures and has instead talked about PC growth offsetting slower console uptake. That alone shows why subscriber count by itself is a blunt instrument – what really matters is revenue per subscriber and how expensive it is to keep the library stocked.

Nintendo Switch Online’s strength is exactly that: while it likely has more total subscribers than Game Pass, the revenue per user is lower – but so are the costs. The retro NES–SNES–N64 catalogue, evergreen DLC like the Mario Kart 8 track pass, or titles such as Tetris 99 are far cheaper to maintain and license than the flood of day-one, big-budget AAA releases Microsoft drops into Game Pass. Nintendo’s bet is that a huge portion of its console base will eventually sign up for NSO, and that the service can be run at a relatively predictable, manageable cost with very long-tail content.

It’s also worth keeping in mind that Nintendo is fairly conservative about how often it shares detailed NSO subscriber numbers, and the last hard figures are not perfectly up to the minute. The overall trend, however, has been clear across the Switch life cycle: Nintendo Switch Online has grown steadily, with spikes around major first-party hits like big Mario and Zelda launches. Game Pass, by contrast, lives and dies by its headline content beats: if there isn’t a steady stream of fresh, high-profile games hitting the catalogue, you can feel it instantly in subscriber enthusiasm and community sentiment.

A third player complicates the picture further: Sony’s PlayStation Plus, which was reworked into Essential / Extra / Premium tiers. It’s trying to land somewhere between the two approaches – part traditional “online access + monthly games”, part Game Pass-style library. For a while its subscriber base hit a ceiling, then started inching up again once the new tiers and stronger first-party releases kicked in. Taken together, the big three services look less like clones competing in a single lane and more like three different answers to the “what should a gaming subscription be?” question.

Based on the GSPlus summary and international reporting, the snapshot today looks roughly like this: Nintendo Switch Online probably leads in sheer subscriber count, Game Pass is the most content-aggressive and expensive to run, and PlayStation Plus is trying to balance between the two philosophies. The next big unknown is what happens when the Switch successor – call it “Switch 2” for now – arrives: will NSO carry over seamlessly, what kind of retro library will it offer, and how will pricing change? On Microsoft’s side, the key question is how far they can stretch the Game Pass model while keeping it profitable in the long term. Subscriber numbers are only one piece of that puzzle.

Sources:
– GSPlus – Nintendo Online beats Game Pass in subscriber count
– Nintendo – Nintendo Switch Online official site
– Xbox – Game Pass official site
– PlayStation – PlayStation Plus official site