Microsoft teased a new partnership with Discord earlier this week This led some players to wonder if the popular chat platform’s paid Nitro subscriptions would start being bundled with Game Pass. It turns out that the opposite is happening. According to the latest leaks, a new tier of the Xbox service called Game Pass “Starter Edition” will soon arrive for Discord users.
Images of the latest version of Game Pass have been discovered and shared by Insights Discord (via The edge) and highlight some of the benefits of integrating Xbox’s Netflix-like game library into Discord’s existing $10 per month Nitro subscription. The “Starter Edition” Game Pass would give Discord users access to more than 50 games, including Stardew Valley and Fallout 4, as well as up to 10 hours of cloud game streaming per month.
Discord Nitro ($9.99) Subscribers will soon be able to enjoy free access to Xbox Game Pass (Starter Edition).
This includes:
– Access to over 50 games from the Game Pass library
– 10 hours per month of cloud game streaming
– Xbox Rewards pic.twitter.com/84a0l80mFl
– Discord Previews (@DiscordPreviews) April 23, 2026
Open source developer xCloud Redphx spotted new code suggesting that the Starter Edition tier would include access to third-party games in addition to Microsoft’s first-party lineup. The current version of Game Pass Essential, which the Starter Edition appears to be based on, currently features mostly perennial favorites like Hades And Warhammer: Vermintide 2 rather than new versions.
The leaks come a month after Xbox CEO Asha Sharma. met with Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters on ways to bundle Game Pass with other subscriptions, and just a week after Microsoft announced that day-and-date versions of Call of Duty would be removed from Game Pass Ultimate to lower its price. The company is would have explored other ways to develop the service to make it more affordable and attract new subscribers.
Sharma released an internal memo on Thursday laying out his vision for Xbox and how it should navigate an increasingly competitive landscape. She pointed out that daily active users are the most important metric, which will definitely increase by bundling Game Pass with Nitro.
It’s unclear whether the price of this subscription will increase to compensate or if this is a temporary experiment to see how the math works out for both companies. Microsoft was in talks to buy Discord for $10 billion back in 2021. He ended up buying Activision Blizzard for $70 billion.
