I can’t say I’m surprised to see Gamepass get a price hike; it always seemed like it was in the loss leader stage to try to grow market share.
I wonder what the reasoning was to institute the hike now, though, since I’m not sure how strong their market share actually is on it.
My theory is that either:
- Microsoft is tired of footing the bill and expects results now
- Microsoft/ Xbox think they have enough market share, so it is time to stop cultivating and time to start harvesting
My understanding is they are still releasing new Series S models, which are basically just Gamepass machines; so I would expect they are not happy with their current market share (though corporations literally never are), which makes me think it’s the former option, not the latter.
All that being said, I wonder how much the price can increase before the value proposition of Gamepass is moot. Right now 20 USD a month doesn’t sound bad as long as you’re playing at least one new game a month, but I wonder how much more room there is in the price before the number of games you would need to play becomes unreasonable.
Personally, I’ve never been a fan of the Gamepass model since I like owning my games physically (it’s the main reason I prefer console to PC), so I don’t have much of a horse in this race; but I will be interested to see what becomes of Gamepass in the long term.
I’ve only really used it to try out new games, it’s a great deal if you only use it for a month at a time!
It’s the circle of enshittification
The new standard option also include online console multiplayer access, which is something that Xbox Game Pass for Console lacked previously.
The standard tier sounds decent, loss of release day games but I’m guessing they’re expecting CoD to push people to the higher tier.
Game Pass used to mean all first party games, day one, and now 2/3 tiers on console won’t have that. It’s a pretty shocking turnaround.
You’re right, it’s a pretty big downgrade and probably reason enough to cancel for a lot. Especially with CoD, they could save the subscription for a few months and then buy it and keep it.
Not surprising. Either this was their long game or MS is in crisis mode, because lately they haven’t been doing so hot.
My wife called this right after the call of duty game pass leak happened
I think Microsoft has been trying to build towards cloud computing of everything on user devices.
Games pass seems to have been them building towards a Google stadia type system. Getting a large user base of monthly subscribers used to Spotify like game experience, and then slowly running more and more off of the user device.
The contraction of studios, internal fighting, and this price hike makes me think they’re is some internal opposition to go all in on this, even as they go full speed ahead on the windows side of things.
