Xbox Game Pass Is Losing The Witcher 3 and Four More Games on August 31
Five games are leaving Xbox Game Pass on August 31, including The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Complete Edition — the open-world fantasy role-playing game from CD Projekt Red and the most prominent title in the group.
The full list of departures: Another Crab's Treasure, I Am Your Beast, Neon Abyss, One Lonely Outpost, and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Complete Edition. All five appeared on the "Leaving Soon" tab in the Xbox mobile app, as reported by GameSpot. TrueAchievements confirmed that the removals apply to both Xbox Game Pass and PC Game Pass, and Pure Xbox flagged Another Crab's Treasure alongside The Witcher 3 as the departures most worth noting.
For anyone unfamiliar with the rhythm: Game Pass is Microsoft's subscription service for games — a monthly fee gets you access to a rotating library rather than buying each title individually. Microsoft adds and removes games in roughly two waves per month, which means the catalogue shifts regularly. A game leaving the service does not disappear from sale; it simply stops being included in the subscription. Players who want to keep playing after August 31 need to buy the game outright.
There is a silver lining for subscribers. Game Pass members get a 20% discount on any of the five departing titles if they purchase them before they leave the service, according to GameSpot. That discount is a standard Game Pass perk designed to soften the blow when a favoured title rotates out.
The Witcher 3 is the headline departure. Released by CD Projekt Red in 2015, it is a sprawling open-world RPG — a genre where players explore a large environment freely rather than following a linear path — following monster hunter Geralt of Rivia. The Complete Edition bundles the base game with its expansions, Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine. It has been one of the most acclaimed games of the past decade, and its absence will be felt by subscribers who treat Game Pass as a way to revisit it without committing to a separate purchase.
The other departures span different genres. Another Crab's Treasure is an underwater action-adventure with a hermit crab protagonist. Neon Abyss is a roguelike — a game where each run generates new levels and death sends you back to the start — set in a pixel-art world. One Lonely Outpost is a farming and colonisation sim. I Am Your Beast is a first-person shooter. None carry the cultural weight of The Witcher 3, but each has its audience within the subscription.
Xbox.com's cloud gaming page already lists Another Crab's Treasure under a "Leaving soon" notice with a "Buy to keep playing on Cloud and more" prompt, signalling that the countdown is visible to players across platforms.
For Game Pass subscribers, the window is short. August 31 is the cutoff, and the 20% discount only applies before that date. Anyone mid-playthrough in any of these five titles should decide whether to finish now or buy to keep.
