Xbox Game Pass Gets Another Day One New Release, The Gunk

The Gunk is an exclusive Xbox and PC release, and it will also go immediately onto Xbox Game Pass upon launch. This means, if you have a Xbox Game Pass, you do not need to buy a standalone copy (unless you want to) and can play The Gunk on day one–December 16–through the subscription service.

The Gunk features space travelers looking for fortune who land on a mysterious planet and explore the unknown landscape. There will be puzzle elements, and it looks like players will also get to suck up mysterious “gunk” with the main character’s mechanical arm.

According to an interview at Pure Xbox with devs Thunderful Group, The Gunk will be permanently exclusive to the Xbox and PC platforms.

We’re seeing new games going immediately onto Xbox’s subscription service more and more often. Halo Infinite, a highly anticipated game with the multiplayer component already out, will also launch day one, December 8, on Xbox Game Pass. Back 4 Blood was also another day one release that was immediately available through Xbox Game Pass.

Going forward, it will be interesting to see if more and more devs will choose to also launch on subscription services. The finances of how such deals work–especially thinking about profits from individual copies sold versus people accessing the game from a flat rate subscription service–are a mystery. The whole financial model of the Xbox Game Pass has a big question mark on it. Our article diving into the numbers for the Xbox Game Pass attempts to take stock of publicly available info and present an overview on Microsoft’s highly influential gaming subscription service.