Square Enix made a surprise appearance at Xbox's recent Developer Direct showcase, announcing plans to bring Visions of Mana to Xbox consoles this year, alongside other platforms. Shortly after, a pre-order page for the game on the Xbox Store was listed with a Game Pass tag, leading to rumours that the game would be coming to the subscription service. However, looking at  the history of this sort of thing, that outcome seems very unlikely. 

While Microsoft has had some big day-one games on Game Pass, it is not a miracle worker and many highly anticipated games have mistakenly gone live for pre-order on Xbox with the Game Pass tag. In the past, this exact same thing has happened with games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Baldur's Gate 3.

Given that the Game Pass tag is frequently mistakenly included on store pages for new games, usually around the time they first go live, it seemed unlikely from the get go that Visions of Mana was a secret Game Pass title. Typically if a game is coming to Game Pass, Microsoft has that deal ready to announce alongside news of the game's launch. Game Pass was not once mentioned during the Visions of Mana section of the Developer Direct.

Now in a statement to Eurogamer, Xbox has confirmed that the Game Pass tag was indeed an error. Visions of Mana will be launching on Xbox, but it won't be a day-one title for Game Pass. That doesn't rule out the possibility of the game joining the service at a future point in time.

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KitGuru Says: We see these kind of rumours pretty regularly and they rarely ever pan out. Perhaps at some point in 2024, Microsoft will finally put some kind of review system in place to ensure these tags don't mistakenly appear on new games so often, leading to unnecessary rumours. 

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