Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer has revealed the Xbox Game Pass subscription service is already profitable, accounting for around 15 per cent of Microsoft’s Xbox content and services revenue.

Spencer revealed this information at yesterday’s Wall Street Journal’s Tech Live conference.

“Game Pass as an overall part of our content and services revenue is probably 15 percent,” says Spencer.

“I don’t think it gets bigger than that. I think the overall revenue grows so 15 percent of a bigger number, but we don’t have this future where I think 50–70 percent of our revenue comes from subscriptions.”

The reasoning for this is merely the limited amount of people that can subscribe.

“We’re seeing incredible growth on PC,” Spencer continued.

“On console, I’ve seen growth slow down, mainly because at some point you’ve reached everybody on console that wants to subscribe.”

Microsoft is yet to raise the price on its Game Pass in the five years since launch, but this won’t be able to last forever, as Spencer explained.

“We’ve held price on our console, we’ve held price on games and our subscription. I don’t think we’ll be able to do that forever,” he said.

“I do think at some point we’ll have to raise some prices on certain things, but going into this holiday we thought it was really important that we maintain the prices that we have.”

The profitability of Game Pass was one bright spot in a lucklustre September quarter earnings report for Microsoft, in which profits slipped 14 per cent.

Although Spencer says Game Pass is profitable, the Xbox content and service revenue was down 3 per cent year-on-year, driven by “declines in first-party content and in third-party content, with lower engagement hours and higher monetisation, particularly offset by growth in Xbox Game Pass subscriptions.”

Microsoft added that PC Game Pass subscriptions increase by 159 percent year over year, and more than 20 million people have streamed games on Xbox Cloud Gaming, up from 10 million earlier this year.