Microsoft reportedly spent $600k to get Cooking Simulator on Xbox Games Pass

It looks like Microsoft made a high steaks deal to get the indie Cooking Simulator onto Xbox Games Pass.

A filing from Polish developer Big Cheese Studio (translated by Twisted Voxel) reveals it was paid $600k by Microsoft, a result of which saw the game making its way onto Xbox's subscription service.

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This turned out to be a pretty great deal for the Polish studio, as the money it received from Microsoft was the equivalent of 22 percent of the company's entire revenue during the previous fiscal year.

Cooking Simulator was originally released in 2019 for PC, with the game then coming to Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and mobile over the subsequent years.

As you'd expect, its popularity on Steam has now fallen since its release. At the time of writing, and per SteamDB, there are 216 players slicing and dicing their way through Cooking Simulator's "highly polished, realistic kitchen".

Meanwhile, its player peak over the last 24 hours is sitting at 232, a noticeable decline from three years ago when it peaked at 3500.

But these figures are for Steam only, with the developer stating it has shifted in excess of 700k copies of the base game since its release, and a further 400k in various add ons.

Even so, this does seem like a sizable chunk of money for Xbox to have spent on adding an older title to Game Pass. And it begs the question how much Microsoft spends getting other, more prolific games into its subcription.

Eurogamer has reached out to Microsoft for comment.