It is not ‘the’ reason, but a reason nonetheless for the price increase. Besides general inflation, I suspect it was the addition of Ubi Classics and Fortnite Crew (especially) that led to $30 monthly for Ultimate IMO. I am fine with keeping Ubi Classics and EA Play. Fortnite Crew being removed would be absolutely fine with me.
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Agreed. I’d rather they do the tiers maybe add new ones. While this news sounds good on one hand it also stirs fears on the other especially if they decide to drop COD but I’m glad she makes it clear that Game Pass is essential to Xbox.
Do they have any idea what they are doing at xbox? If they retool these subs again, I’ll be shocked.
They already took cod out of the middle/bottom tier. Their setup now works. Top tier has everything, next two tiers have limits.
a la carte suggestions - where does this stop. everyone has their own ideas of the perfect system based on the games they play. Where does it end? I prob don’t play 95% of the games on game pass, should I demand a 95% discount b/c those other games are worthless to me? a lot carte to me just means buy what you want. why does a person want a la carte on a sub service. There is already a la carte. sub to a lower tier and purchase the gaps you want filled in.
I feel like this isn’t as complicated as everyone is making it out to be. xbox has so many different ways to play games. Buy physical, buy used, buy digital, buy on sales, rent on one of three service tiers. Or a mixture of all these options. You don’t even need hardware to play. The amount of options are crazy. When people say gp ultimate is too expensive what is it being compared to? Buying? Then just cancel the sub and buy. If someone thinks one tier of a sub service exceeds their gaming budget, aren’t they just saying it would be a better deal for them to play a different way such as buying? Just do that. Or sub here and there. There is no lock in.
I’m all for a good deal and I understand everyone has a different perspective on value. But I feel like people look at game pass as the only way available to play games.
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For me it seemed like Fortnite Crew and Ubisoft classics were symptoms not the cause. I don’t think it’s just COD either. I think the day one model is hard to sustain with the sheer volume of first party games. Fortnite Crew and Ubisoft Classics felt like additions they could more or less write off while using that as an excuse to massively bump up the price. Like Fortnite Crew obviously came with some larger partnership that’s led to Fortnite becoming Xbox Play Anywhere and joining the Microsoft Store (which is kinda big considering it’s the first time Fortnite is on something other than the epic games store). There’s also been sweepstakes and some other marketing. Ubisoft Classics might have actually functionally cost Microsoft nothing or been part of a larger deal behind the scenes since they have the whole thing where they sold Ubisoft the cloud gaming rights for Activision Blizzard games. Plus I also don’t think Ubisoft cares much about their classics library. They can’t possibly expect to get a ton more sales for those games. Even if you can just remove those and lower the price, there might be some contractual obligations.
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Last year they brought in over $5 Billion Revenue with expenditure of $1 Billion. Seems rather easy to sustain.
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The problem is truly that Ultimate is seen as the default for everyone & Xbox set the expectation that Game Pass IS the day one games promise. Essential and Premium are really solid, and Premium is what most people should subscribe for. But everyone looks to Ultimate and then gets mad at the big sticker price. It makes sense on paper, but really Xbox would have to go back 10 years, start with premium & first party games after a year. And then launch Ultimate in 2024 with all first party and partner third party games day one, COD, Fortnite CREW, EA Play, Ubisoft Classics, and perks. People then be really happy with the tiers. They can either keep paying the same amount for premium or upgrade to the “LET’S GET STOOPID” tier, but that’s fundamentally not how inflation works. Also Xbox didn’t know how much their first party output would grow in such a short time. Day one on Game Pass was needed back then to build up good will and help Xbox find a new differentiator. I think under normal circumstances this would’ve been done gradually and easier to swallow for fans. However, Xbox did grow a lot very quickly. I think COVID also inadvertently played a role because so many of the XGS studio purchases took longer than expected to get their games out, and then all of a sudden we have everything coming at once + the additional Bethesda and ABK purchases.
The ever persistent problem is chasing year over year growth. With increasing dev costs it seems hard to maintain and grow that with 75+ day one games including COD. Microsoft as a business would also consider the money they think they could have made off sales but didn’t because people chose to subscribe instead as a loss and compare. I imagine they also have to look at stuff like how long people stay subscribed for and long term subscription revenue and what not. I mean I’m not inside Microsoft. I’m just wondering to what extent they could even lower the price without it no longer making sense because we’ve gone from years like 2022 where there’s mostly just AA games to consistent years like 2024 where it’s several first party AAA games (sometimes back to back) pretty fast.
I mean as far as last year, I think the existing tiers are fine. At this point they’ve already effectively pulled back on day one games or a more reasonable offering. So it’s that, can they really lower the price without compromising on that even more? Hopefully they can.
If Microsoft removes COD which is their biggest IP, then what makes anyone believe that they won’t remove everything else? Then what? They’ll try to sell their games and go back to exclusivity and how did that work out over the last 25 years? Answer is that it didn’t which is why they changed in the first place.
I can see everything that benefits me on Xbox is going to be taken away and if/when that happens, im done with Microsoft and Xbox. I will go straight to PC and Valve/Steam. No more dealing with all of this bullshit because every time there’s something good that actually benefits me personally, it gets taken away.
Pricing wise, there should be three tiers -
- Game Pass Core (console/pc)
$10/month. Vaulted games. Day one games get added a year after it releases.
- Game Pass Premium (console/pc)
$20/month. Becomes what Ultimate currently is but removes the online multi-player paywall which they’re going to have to do anyway once Helix releases. Also removes all the perks/benefits for games like Fortnite and whatnot. In no way, shape or form should Microsoft remove their games from being day one in Ultimate because at that point, why even bother having this subscription service in the first place?
- Game Pass Ultimate (console/pc)
$30/month. Same as above but includes all the perks for Fortnite and whatnot while also adding the premium editions of their games like Ubisoft does with Ubisoft+. DLC/expansions always have a horrible attach ratio. Well, this would give incentive to staying/going with Ultimate.
Note: Just thought of something. Perhaps separating the campaign and multi-player for COD. Campaign gets added to Game Pass Premium/Ultimate while the multi-player gets sold for $40. Microsoft makes money and I get the campaign in Game Pass Premium/Ultimate.
For Steam/Epic, PlayStation and Nintendo, it stays as a $70 package.
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Great news, the new boss truly gets it & is doing such a good job in a short space of time
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Going “à la carte” is what’s best for consumers, but we all know most people will go for the cheapest option possible to get Day 1 games.
MS’s challenge will be juggling with the price to attract players back(if any left from GP) or more along with being competitive with the competition in terms of value.
The value proposition is definitely there with their other tiers I think, the problem is they made day 1 their staple offering and when that got too expensive, people got mad. It’s almost like people don’t consider Essential and Premium as tiers that exists and priced competitively, most people will say GPU is too expensive and call it a day and say they cancelled it all, even though they could drop down 1 tier and still have access to games within a few months.
The one thing I’ll say though is that they need to have 3/6/12 month cards with a rebate if you buy more months at once, as this is something Sony does and it can make it a lot cheaper yet will lock you in for longer as well, so it’s a win/win for the consumer and MS.
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People online certainly don’t treat the lower tiers like they exist. Though the problem is we don’t even know how many of those even really subscribe to GP or have an Xbox for that matter. I’d really just love to probe every Xbox Game Pass subscriber to see what tier they sub to and how they feel about it.
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That’s the way it works: to get headlines, the press will always use the highest figure & that’s the case for so many products on sale
I’m against having different tiers as I feel they just confuse & complicate matters & would rather one flat rate, but guess they have a role to play
I’ll be all for getting rid of COD games being day one on Game Pass, if that means a £5 to £10 discount off Ultimate, as even for me, it’s getting too expensive & our kids are grown up. But everything in life has gone up thanks to bloody COVID
As I wrote above, yeah, I would drop everything else for just day one games, as nothing else being offered is something I use, it’s gotten to the point I don’t even use the perks like discord nitro(like why the hell is this even a thing?).
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Next to exclusivity (not all are counting on it), this is her biggest test.
As others point out though, many of the perks likely don’t cost Xbox very much, so getting rid might not save much money.
EA Play is only on PC and requires their app which gives them data, and given it’s only the cheap tier it likely costs Xbox very little or is even just offset by some marketing deal.
Ubi Classics may act purely to get users in and buying DLC, given PlayStation offers them too - I’m guessing it doesn’t cost much.
And Fortnite may cost a bit, but yes is likely wrapped up in some marketing deal, or a perk to get Ultimate gamers (who likely spend more than your average) to keep coming in every month so might be hardly anything.
Instead, those additional services are just there to sweeten the Ultimate deal for likely little additional expenditure by Microsoft.
Finally the perks like 3 months free Discord etc you get with pretty much every rewards program so likely cost nothing as they’re to entice new subs to those services
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Can’t lie I feel this way as well. Also, I don’t believe for a minute that COD saps all Game Pass revenue considering game pass did about 5 billion last year and is set to be even higher this year. I think they just want the Game Pass revenue and COD revenue as well. If Game Pass drops COD, there will be class action lawsuit, and it won’t be long before they drop another first party.
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The terms of Game Pass state games will join/leave the service. There would be no class action lawsuit and no other first party game’s revenue is comparablej to COD, the biggest yearly release in gaming.
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Yeah it’s really the potential gains that pushes everything up. And no company wants to leave money on the table or knowingly do something they know will make less money this year than they made last year.
I doubt that. Even if it isn’t winnable there will be backlash and I think some will try after all there were meaningless cases during ABK trial from some gamers as I recall.
I feel most people playing CoD through Game Pass aren’t just going to buy the game when it leaves, as a lot of people have mentioned only even getting back into it because of Game Pass.
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