Kill the studios and raise the prices, that oughta solve things!
A little over a month past its seventh anniversary, things are changing for Microsoft’s Game Pass. And as time goes on, it might not be the sweet deal many have previously seen it as.
For one, the price is increasing; an obvious move, as you’ve seen every subscription service do over the past several years. But there’s also a shuffling of the tiers. The console version of Game Pass will be shuttered entirely for any new users (active users may maintain their subscription, though). A new tier, Xbox Game Pass Standard, will launch in September for a monthly price of $14.99. And it probably represents one of the biggest changes.
While it comes with Xbox Live Gold and the back catalog, Standard won’t include Xbox Cloud Gaming, nor day one games.
In addition to all of that, Ultimate will now cost $19.99 monthly. PC Game Pass will increase in price from $9.99 to $11.99, but will still include day one games. Xbox Game Pass Core (a.k.a. Xbox Live Gold Multiplayer) will remain $9.99 a month, but the annual subscription will increase from $54.99 to $74.99. These price increases are global. If you’d like to get ahead of this, the new prices go into effect September 12th this year. But you may want to hold off on that for just a minute.
The biggest change, however, is that you will no longer be able to stack subscriptions like before for the Console version of Game Pass. Previously, you were able to stack subscriptions up to 36 months (and once upon a time, there was no limit, which is how you can find people with well over 100 years of Game Pass). Now, that will be limited to a whopping 13 months. So you may want to stack as much as you can before September 12th, if you’re so inclined. Ultimate, presumably, is unaffected. You could interpret this as a means of gently getting users off of the old form of Console Game Pass to migrate to Standard tier.
If all of that seems unnecessarily confusing to you, don’t feel too bad. It seems to be the same strategy Microsoft uses for Microsoft 365 Business, where they offer so many SKUs of synonymous names that they seem to want you to screw up and get the wrong one so as to incur unnecessary charges.
Now, naturally, people have been pointing out that this price increase is proof that Microsoft lied during the proceedings for the merger with Activision Blizzard King:
I, personally, am not so certain of that, if you’ll excuse the editorializing. Game Pass has never seemed to make sense as a business model to me. The day one games, in particular, struck me as something that was guaranteed to cannibalize sales of any such game launched this way. After all, why spend $60-$70 on one game when a sub-$20 monthly subscription gets you that game and more? Game Pass may or may not be financially successful in and of itself; they don’t seem to ever provide numbers so we may never know (though I’m hard-pressed to believe it’s a viable, profitable model).
If I were to bet, I’d say the nearly blanket price increase here is due to the fact that Game Pass probably doesn’t make as much money as actually selling the damn games they’re making internally, disregarding any other costs or margins. Fundamentally speaking, Tango Gameworks died due to this likelihood.
Regardless, this will be Game Pass as of mid-September. Maybe we all should’ve listened to Chad Warden, eh?
About Author
