The head of Microsoft's Xbox business, Phil Spencer, has insisted that its Game Pass is "sustainable".

Speaking to Axios, the exec said that the subscription service is working properly now and shot down criticism that the Big M was wasting cash in hopes of a huge pay-off later down the line.

“I know there's a lot of people that like to write [that] we're burning cash right now for some future pot of gold at the end,” Spencer said.

“No. Game Pass is very, very sustainable right now as it sits. And it continues to grow.”

Microsoft has also invested heavily in cloud streaming in recent years with its xCloud platform. And in the future, Spencer reckons that there are going to be more people experiencing its games on phones than PC and console.

“At some point in our future, more people are going to be part of the Xbox community on mobile than they are on any other device," he explained, "just by the nature of how many mobile phones there are.”

Xbox Game Pass boasts 18 million users, as of January 2021. The service did miss Microsoft's goal for subscribers for the 12 months ending June 30th, 2021.