Xbox Game Pass Ultimate just raised its prices by a full 50%, and players should take stock of what they're really getting out of it now.
series of hikes to its hardware. The top tier, and most valuable with its day one console releases, Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, has jumped from $20 to $30 a month in the US. In some regions, the price has doubled.
There’s a phenomenon in the age of everything being a subscription where the “slow frog boil” of a few dollar increases every couple years is able to be tolerated by most. You sort of forget you have these subscriptions or what they cost, even as they slowly slide the price up over time. But a 50% increase like this is a total shock to the system. It makes you sit up and take stock of whether you’regetting that much value out of the subscription, in this case, examining if Xbox Game Pass is once the value it seemed to be. Since July 2023, the price of Game Pass has now doubled after two price hikes, $15 to $17, then $17 to $20. But now, $20 to $30 is just a wild jump, and I cannot for the life of me find $360 worth of value, just under the price of a launch PS4, every year for this service.Microsoft has attempted to say that the additions they’ve made to Ultimate are worth the increase, which includes more games in a catalogue that you probably are not even remotely close to working your way through now, and also the subscription services Ubisoft+ Classic, full of a whole lot of old Assassin’s Creed games, and Fortnite Crew, a monthly subscription for a single game to get currency and exclusive skins. I am unimpressed. Part of this is my larger switch to PC, and the desire to build out my Steam library rather than bank on Xbox adding the games I want to Game Pass and honestly, I’m just not sure I trust Xbox as a brand anymore. They have no direction, they’ve raised prices so much on hardware it feels like they’re actively trying to kill off that division, and they have made staying within its ecosystem unappealing. If they are crazy enough to raise the price of an Xbox Series X to $800 or Game Pass to $30 a month, what are they going to do next? And even if I am still planning to buy games for Xbox, am I spending $360 a year on games that would have otherwise launched on day one for “free” on Game Pass? Or playing enough old games in their back catalogue I would have needed to buy otherwise? There’s just no way that adds up. Honestly, it probably didn’t add up back when it was $240 either, but again, it’s taken a ridiculous price hike to get me to sit up and take notice and figure out why I’m actually holding on to this. So, am I just downgrading to a lower tier? I don’t even know. I’m not sure what the point is of investing in the Xbox ecosystem at all now is. If I’m mostly a PC player now, I’m just going to play everything on PC. The last Xbox exclusive I played this year was Avowed…on Steam at launch. If I am playing anything on console, I might as well just pick up third-party games on PS5 , and Sony certainly still has the more robust line-up of first-party exclusives which are, in fact, exclusive. I have to sit down and play Ghost of Yotei on my PS5 today, as it is not on my PC. Perhaps that’s more “anti-consumer,” but it’s the reality of the situation. Every move Xbox makes now seems designed to actively repel players. They can cite market conditions, but what’s supposed to happen when you’re selling $600-$800 consoles five years after release? What’s supposed to happen when your subscription service doubles in price in two years? At this point, I’m good. I have other options, options that Xbox seems like it wants me to pursue.
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