They’re trying to soften the blow by adding new features to each tier, but it’s still just to disguise a price hike. More games are coming to the $15 tier, but it still won’t be day and date releases. First party games come to the $15 tier “within a year”, but that’s even excluding Call of Duty.
More than a 100% price hike in my country. Just downgraded from ultimate to premium because my kid has an Xbox and it is still cheaper than buying the games individually.
But, otherwise I would have cancelled the plan.
At one time XBOX fanbase were so desperate to play games like Halo and Gears of War that they were wrapping their dead XBOX 360 in a towel and putting it in an oven to resurrect it. That sounds so insane but it actually happened. Fast forward to now, Microsoft has raised hardware prices twice since May and now raising price of their game pass by 50%. Clearly they’re no longer interested in increasing XBOX market share or even retaining it. They’ve pivoted their strategy to milk their current XBOX fans as much money as they can until the brand is completely dead.
Not just business, the same dynamic is working for China right now too
Canceled my subscription. Fuck you, Microsoft.
This was always the plan and it will absolutely get worse. corporations only care about “line go up” they have never and will never give a fuck about the “customer”.
The plan was to become the Netflix of video games, which they’re about 85-90% short of, so a price increase isn’t going to help that, and they know it.
Well I’m glad I’m already not paying them for this anymore, saves me having to cancel my subscription now.
I barely even buy 5 games a year, and often not at full price. And usually the games I want aren’t even on GamePass anyways.
$360/year is crazy. Only a good deal if you’re buying more than 6 full price games a year and plan to 100% beat them and never play again before they disappear from the catalog.
We used to really enjoy game pass as a family. I think the best part is discovering games that we wouldn’t have played otherwise. But at some point we stopped using it, so we cancelled. We’ve gotten 1 or 2 months free or cheap a couple of times now, but I ended up mainly playing one game… Although I suppose I did discover that I liked Avowed more than Expedition 33 😳. If I’d had to buy them, I would have only bought Expedition 33.
So I think we’ll keep going like this… Once a year or so use a cheap trial to get a month and try a lot of games, and use steam sales the rest of the year, and every now and then buy a full price game we really want.
Sounds like how a lot of us use streaming television these days, too. The price hikes change the dynamic, for sure. And I also liked Avowed more than Expedition 33.
That’s it, this is the last Xbox console I’ll ever buy
do they inject ads into loading screens and cut scenes?
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I’m so glad I use Microsoft Rewards.
Are you also aware that you can no longer use those to get Game Pass?
Oh I just looked, are you serious.
