Microsoft’s latest moves around Game Pass have left fans scratching their heads as price increases and ad tests stir up frustration.
It’s been a wild few days for Xbox fans. Just when it seemed like the week was finally winding down after all the price hike drama around Game Pass, we just got more drama. At this point, a whole documentary could be made about this Game Pass debacle, but we want to save you that trouble, so please read on until the end. So, what was supposed to be a quiet end to the week quickly turned into one of the biggest controversies Microsoft has ever seen.
Let’s start with the Game Pass situation. So if you were subscribed to Game Pass, you should have noticed that the discounts you usually get on digital games and DLC suddenly weren’t showing up anymore.
Typically, Ultimate subscribers receive a small price break when purchasing add-ons or expansions for titles included in the service. It’s one of those things that made Game Pass feel like a better deal. But those discounts? Gone. Disappeared. Poof, just like that. That’s where all this really started, if you didn’t know already.
Some bundles, such as the premium upgrade for Indiana Jones, still show the typical 10% off, but a lot of DLC across the Game Pass library is now listed at full price. The 20% discount on full game purchases appears to still be in effect, but that doesn’t change the fact that this adjustment came out of nowhere.
Microsoft hasn’t said a word about it, and considering how poorly their other recent announcements have gone over, it’s not surprising they decided not to draw attention to another negative change. So all this really ties into the bigger pattern of Microsoft shuffling its Game Pass tiers and pricing in the background. Just weeks ago, they quietly raised the price of PC Game Pass from $12 to around $16.50 per month.
That news didn’t even come from an official announcement. So you can imagine the Xbox community’s anger. Making stealth adjustments and hoping people won’t notice until later isn’t as smart as you may have thought, Microsoft. You can’t escape the gaming world’s eyes.
Reports surfaced about Xbox consoles being spotted on clearance shelves at Sam’s Club, following similar moves by Costco earlier this year.
Pictures shared online showed Xbox Series S units selling for around $240. Costco had already stopped selling Xbox systems, both in-store and online, citing it as a “business decision.” Now Sam’s Club has joined the club—clearing out Xbox stock to make room for better-selling products. Again, not a good look when two giant warehouse retailers back out of selling your product.
And as if all that wasn’t enough, Xbox found itself in the spotlight for another reason when FTC chair Lina Khan posted about Microsoft’s post-Activision acquisition practices. She highlighted the company’s wave of layoffs and price hikes since the $69 billion deal closed, saying that the deal overlooked both us and the devs.
She wasn’t wrong about the price hikes, but it’s also worth noting that the entire industry is raising prices—Sony, Nintendo, Ubisoft, everyone. Still, the timing couldn’t be worse for Microsoft.
A new report sheds light on how badly Game Pass might actually be hurting Xbox’s bottom line. According to insider sources, Microsoft lost over $300 million in sales last year by putting Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 on Game Pass instead of selling it directly for $70. CFO Amy Hood has reportedly asked the Xbox team to find new ways to increase profit after that shortfall, and it’s child’s play to see how that might’ve played into the subscription price hikes.
Call of Duty is incredibly expensive to produce. Leaked court documents from Microsoft’s battle with the FTC revealed that Black Ops Cold War cost approximately $700 million to develop in 2020. If Black Ops 6 crossed the billion-dollar mark, it wouldn’t be shocking. So, if Microsoft is eating $300 million in potential sales just to increase Game Pass subscriptions, it’s no wonder they’re raising prices.
Simply put, Xbox doesn’t seem to have a clear plan. It’s just one change after another, each one making things worse for subscribers. The Game Pass Ultimate tier jumped to $30 a month, PC Game Pass got more expensive, and the pros are getting fewer by the minute—the pros that once made Game Pass such a sweet deal. Instead of being the “best deal in gaming,” Game Pass is starting to look like another overpriced subscription.
Microsoft is internally testing a free, ad-supported version of Xbox Cloud Gaming.
The idea is that players could stream select games without paying for Game Pass, as long as they watch ads. Are you seeing this? Who even is making these decisions at Microsoft? Game Pass is no Netflix or Spotify, mind you. Adding these restrictions to gaming is just “utter woke nonsense”. Anyhoo, each session would last an hour, and users could play for up to five hours per month after watching two minutes of ads before each play session.
It’s a tried and tested strategy, as I have said, with Netflix and Spotify, of course, but the issue is that games don’t have natural breaks like TV shows, movies, or music. No one, and I mean nobody, would want their campaign session interrupted so they can sit through a trailer for laundry detergent.
To be fair, there are other services with free streaming tiers—NVIDIA’s GeForce Now, for instance, lets you play for an hour per session. But even then, five hours per month sounds ridiculously low. That’s likely just a testing limit, but if that number carried over to the public launch, it would barely be worth the effort.
And here’s where things really start to sting for Xbox supporters.
If Microsoft can make this ad-supported model work, what’s stopping them from eventually placing ads in paid tiers or even within the games themselves? That might sound far-fetched, but it’s not impossible, especially given what we are seeing right now with Microsoft’s efforts to extract money from our pockets.
The most disappointing aspect of this is how poorly Microsoft has handled the rollout of these changes. The order in which they’ve announced things has made everything feel worse. If they had introduced the ad-supported free tier first, before announcing the $30 Ultimate price, maybe we would’ve seen it as a way to make Xbox more accessible. Instead, the news of an ad tier followed the massive price hike, and it just feels like they’ve stopped caring for us.
Fans aren’t just frustrated; we are confused. There’s an impending sense that Microsoft doesn’t know in which direction it wants Xbox to go anymore. The company spent years building goodwill by positioning Game Pass as the future of gaming, but now that trust is being broken, brick by brick, along with our hearts.
You can see it across social media: people who used to defend Xbox no matter what are now questioning whether the brand has a future. That’s not a great place to be for Xbox, a company that once prided itself on being the player-first alternative to Sony. Don’t get me wrong, I am the last person to wish ill upon Xbox, but it just stings even worse when you know how easily avoidable all this drama could have been if only Microsoft had cared enough.
It’s particularly wild considering that Xbox is approaching its 25th anniversary next year.
After two and a half decades in the console business, Microsoft should have a better handle on how to keep its fan base happy. Instead, the company appears to be moving backward, conducting business experiments that nobody needed or asked for.
Maybe all of this will make more sense once Microsoft officially announces its next big move (a revamped Game Pass, please). But for now, it feels like the Xbox brand is at a crossroads, and not the good kind.
Xbox’s leadership has lost sight of what made their platform special in the first place. Game Pass has become the butt of the joke for the gaming community now, almost overnight, and that should be Microsoft’s worst nightmare.
We used to joke about how Xbox was the best deal in gaming. These days, that line doesn’t hit the same. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to justify keeping the subscription, especially at this price range. Microsoft might be making moves to improve profitability, but at what cost? Because at the end of the day, no one wants to feel nickel-and-dimed by the platform they’ve supported for years. And right now, that’s exactly how Xbox fans feel.
