The Ascent is the latest Game Pass release to succeed beyond Xbox’s service

The Ascent generated $5 million in revenue and topped the Steam global sales chart over its opening weekend. That’s according to publisher Curve Digital, which is hyping up the indie hit as a true “triple-A competitor.” That success is even more impressive considering many players could get the game at no additional cost through Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass service on console, PC, and the cloud.

But the reality is that The Ascent is hardly an outlier in terms of Game Pass releases finding success outside of that Xbox service. Like other games, developer Neon Giant’s action role-playing shooter probably owes some of its success to Game Pass’s network effect.