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Microsoft announces surprise Xbox Game Pass price cuts, ends day one Call of Duty inclusion — Ultimate down to $22.99 while PC Game Pass drops to $13.99
After several years of subsequent price rises and management restructuring that led many gamers to believe the Xbox brand was on its way out, Microsoft has pulled off a surprise move. The company announced today in a press release that it would bring the price of Game Pass Ultimate back down from $29.99 to $22.99, while the PC Game Pass goes from $16.49 to $13.99 a month.
It's not all good news, though, as those who subscribed to Game Pass for the sole purpose of playing Call of Duty (CoD) will now have to wait around a year for new titles to appear on the platform. The change does not affect existing CoD releases, and all other day-one game releases will continue.
The now-nullified decision to include CoD in a monthly subscription was widely deemed as particularly gutsy. The game sells tens of millions of copies a year. At $70 a pop for the standalone title, it's possible the company was leaving hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars, on the table.
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Even still, in the broader scheme of things, this development is quite the volte-face for Microsoft, which repeatedly hiked the price of both the consoles and subscriptions over the past couple of years. Those decisions led to wide speculation that the company could be preparing for the end of the Xbox brand, in light of a minority market share versus the PlayStation.
This Game Pass price drop is the first big commercial move since Asha Sharma took over the division. The choice of executive was a move out of left field, as she was previously managing the Core AI business. Nevertheless, Sharma is reportedly spearheading an effort to revitalize the brand, and bringing down subscription prices to more reasonable prices is a decision that will definitely be appreciated by gamers.
Bruno Ferreira is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware. He has decades of experience with PC hardware and assorted sundries, alongside a career as a developer. He's obsessed with detail and has a tendency to ramble on the topics he loves. When not doing that, he's usually playing games, or at live music shows and festivals.
At this point I'm not going back to Ultimate as I'm sure this will only be around for a few months maybe a year at most before they jack it up again or just end day one releases completely
IIRC one of the price hikes to gamepass was becasue of CoD.
CoD is one of the dumbest fanbases in gaming (same thing just different skin every yr and has been since MW2 on XB outside zombies & the one that added the exoskeletons)
Could of ran the same original 3 games and just added maps/looks as dlc and it wouldnt change anything.
I don't do gamepass anymore but being cheaper is good as bunch of indie games people can enjoy on there.
Hiking the price over putting CoD on Game Pass day-one was a terrible idea to begin with. Basically the same idea as mandatory cable TV "Regional Sports Franchise Fees" (no idea if those still exist, cut the cord almost two decades ago):
Have all subscribers subsidize content that only a minority actually regularly accesses and which represents a disproportionately high expense, because that minority was seen as unlikely to pay for it if they had to shoulder the whole cost.
But many CoD players are extreme devotees who play almost nothing else, and are frequently willing to pay quite a bit. They should have just made it like NFL Sunday Ticket (if that still exists) - a separate, premium subscription that offers exclusive benefits you can't get anywhere else.
If they had just launched a "CoD Pass", and included benefits like being able to start playing the multiplayer part of each game a week before commercial launch, a certain amount of in-game credits and boosters each month, time-limited exclusive weapon/gear skins for 3/6-month or annual subs, etc, they probably could have asked $20/month for that alone.
Don't say microsoft, MS as a whole makes like 2-300bil a year, the gaming arm of that is just a tiny part of MS, valve makes like 20bil a year.
(Also valve sells a lot of MS owned games, so valve is making money for MS)
