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It’s time to draw a line in the sand. A bright green line. Microsoft just announced a 50% increase to Xbox Game Pass subscriptions, bringing the cost of Game Pass Ultimate up to $30/month.
The announcement was part of a larger reveal that includes a new Game Pass tier and, most importantly, confines Game Pass’s best benefit to its most expensive tier. Free Day-One games will now only be available at the Ultimate price-point. This means you’ll spend $360 a year gaining access to these launch day titles and online multiplayer.
There are other benefits, like EA Play and Fortnite Crew, but the Day-One release has been Microsoft’s top selling point for Game Pass subscribers. The question you have to ask yourself is what you’re willing to spend to access these, especially since you won’t actually own the games.
The base price for Game Pass Essential is now $10/month and includes online multiplayer. Assuming you play multiplayer games, this is the cost of doing business. You will have to spend the $120/year for this tier. That means you’re spending an additional $240 on Ultimate. This gets you a much wider catalog of Game Pass games to play (400 vs 50) plus other perks, but unless you’re really diving into the Game Pass catalog, the number one question is: Will I spend over $240 on Xbox games this year, making Ultimate a cost-effective subscription?
The price-hike is yet another consequence of the $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard. Microsoft is banking on Call Of Duty fans using the Game Pass Ultimate perk to get the new Call Of Duty title each year as part of their subscription. But that’s a $70 game, well shy of the $240 you’re spending on Ultimate. And even though Microsoft has had some quality exclusives in the past couple years, I’m dubious that there are enough of these to justify Ultimate’s price-tag.
Call Of Duty players, in particular, rarely play anything else (broadly speaking). Even if a Call Of Duty player plays one other major release a year, it’s not at all certain that this will even be a Day-One launch title from Microsoft. Let’s say you want to play EA’s upcoming shooter, Battlefield 6. That game isn’t included with a base EA Play subscription. You’ll have to upgrade to EA Play Pro, which is an additional monthly cost on top of your Game Pass subscription. It’s still cheaper to just purchase Black Ops 7 and Battlefield 6, which will then both be games you own regardless of your subscription status.
At one point in time, Game Pass was a very tempting proposition, offering players a bunch of games they might otherwise skip and giving everyone access to Microsoft’s first-party exclusives on day one. Now, a year of Game Pass Ultimate costs roughly what you’d pay for an Xbox Series S console. Even if you purchase Call Of Duty, you’ll still have money left over to buy at least one or two more AAA releases, or a handful of smaller releases.
The question comes down to how many games you play, how much you use Game Pass and whether it makes sense to keep forking over your money each month with this price hike, or if you’d be okay at the $10/mo level to just have access to multiplayer. Or just switch to PC where you can access multiplayer games for free without a subscription of any kind and can still play pretty much everything that’s on Xbox. Granted, the initial cost is higher, but over time it’s not a bad investment.
This is the trajectory of our techlord future. A company announces a service or subscription that’s cheap and attractive. This undercuts the market (Game Pass has been hard on the video game industry; Uber basically killed taxis; behold the advent of AI and what it’s doing ot multiple industries) and then, once we’re all looped in, the prices go up, up and away. Uber is not cheaper than taking a taxi. Game Pass is not cheaper than owning your own games.
I’ve already downgraded my Game Pass tier to Essential, and I’d probably get rid of it altogether if I didn’t have kids who play online Xbox games. There is the bright green line. There is the sand. Time to draw.