Players are digging into Xbox Game Pass now that the company has officially launched its new Xbox Game Pass Standard tier. However, they’ve discovered that it’s missing quite a few noteworthy titles, including some that were already on the service before Xbox switched to its new payment structure.
Xbox published a post on September 10 marking the move, and explaining its new Game Pass plans in a succinct manner. Want to just use your Xbox for multiplayer? Grab Game Pass Core. Just want games on your PC? Get PC Game Pass. Game Pass Standard, arguably the most confusing new tier of the bunch when it was announced back in July, is for people who want to “level up [their] Xbox console gaming experience at a great value.” It costs $15 per month compared to Ultimate’s $20 per month (up from $17).
With the launch comes a retooled online catalog, which users have been using to see what’s missing on Standard (via Kotaku). If you go to the Xbox website, you can sort games by membership. If you click on Game Pass Standard, you’ll see that it features 370 games at the time of this writing, compared to Ultimate’s 508.
This was expected, since Xbox said only its Ultimate tier would be getting day-one launches, although an Xbox spokesperson confirmed to Digital Trends that existing Game Pass for Console players will receive day-one games if they keep their subscriptions. Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, out in November, is only coming to Ultimate, Game Pass for Console, and PC Game Pass, for example. However, Standard is missing some first-party titles that are already out. That includes recent releases like Starfield, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Diablo 4, Forza Motorsport, Valorant, and Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2. There are still some first-party titles on Standard, of course, like Minecraft and spinoffs, Pentiment, Prey, the Dishonored games, and Psychonauts games.
However, third-party titles that were added to the service over the past couple of months aren’t available: Age of Mythology: Retold, Still Wakes the Deep, Star Trucker, and Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn, just to name a few. (There’s a handy list on the Xbox subreddit that shows what games are missing, although it’s not complete.)
Xbox hasn’t made it clear how long it will take day-one launches on Ultimate to make it to the Standard tier, only noting that they might be added to Standard “up to 12 months late or more.” Since the subscription tiers have changed over, players should also note that cloud gaming is only available on the Ultimate tier.
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”
It’s turning into a pretty good time to be a Monster Hunter fan who plays on a phone. Capcom has confirmed that Monster Hunter Outlanders will launch on Android and iOS on October 29, giving the series a new mobile-first game just as Monster Hunter Rise is also preparing to make the jump to smartphones through Netflix.
Outlanders is being developed by Tencent subsidiary TiMi Studio Group under license and supervision from Capcom. Unlike Rise, which appears to be the full console and PC game adapted for mobile, Outlanders is a free-to-play survival hunting game made specifically for phones.