I have long championed Gamepass as a great value, but as of this week that now comes to an end. Your mileage may vary here, but their newly announced price hike to bring the service to $30 a month firmly tips the scales out of balance with any value I’ve gotten from the service.
I went and took a look at the games I’ve played through Gamepass this year (significant time, not just a 5-10 min peek), and I then added up their full, day-one retail costs assuming I had simply bought them outright. The cost roughly broke even with what I paid for the year of service, and in a tie I’m willing to give Gamepass the win just to recognize the convenience it afforded me to try games to see if I was into them.
But at $30 a month, I no longer feel confident that I’m going to play enough of the games they offer for the price to make sense, and we’ve now crossed the threshold where I’m better off buying the few games I want directly from the publisher (and owning them outright, which has never been a big concern of mine, but it doesn’t hurt).
I actually stacked my Gamepass subscription last month (bought a year’s worth of EA Play subscriptions, and converted them to Gamepass Ultimate), so I’ll have the service until late 2026. But after that point, unless something changes in the next year (and the fact that the ‘change subscription’ page for GamePass has been crashing all afternoon suggests enough people are canceling to perhaps influence change), me and Xbox will be pretty much done.
Better to own the game and contribute directly to the game creators so they make more of the quality games you’re willing to spend money on.
The only people you’re paying is the publisher, the investors, and the marketplace. Nearly every project is funded and the people are paid once the project has been given the greenlight. They go around and pitch the idea, then they find investors and capital. From that capital, the budget is drawn up, and people are paid. What they want you buy games for, is so the middlemen get return on investment. They get that money back plus MORE. The dev team if they are lucky won’t get laid off after project completion and will be shoved to some other project,… Read more »
Working in the industry for years at AAA, this. Maybe indie devs turn around and reinvest their hard earned money directly, who knows, but our studios continue to get greenlit based on performance whether that’s from direct sales or Gamepass perf.
I don’t know why you’re getting voted down. This is a fact of the games industry. Unless you’re an indie with a reputation big enough to get crowdfunded, you’re working under a publisher who takes the lion’s share of the profits.
You mean the people who invested the money and took the risk? Yeah that’s how all business works. Companies don’t invest their money for all the costs of something to take a minority share of the proceeds when that thing succeeds.
In reality, Gamepass was already doing that. The system basically worked like: “Here is an average of what your game is likely to make in X time. This is what we will pay you for X game to be on Gamepass for Y amount of time.” Those that refused, especially Indie game makers, often found that their gamble didn’t pay off as their game got buried amidst all the other games. An example (of many) is Edge of Eternity. Would I have ever played that without Gamepass? Hell no. The graphics on the game are rough as hell which is… Read more »
Yep. That’s why Kickstarter ones are the way to go. Sea of Stars, Undertale, Pillars of Eternity, Hollow knight, Everspace, etc. . Looking forward to what comes in the future.
From what I can tell, this change influenced only the GamePass versions for console?
If I’m reading it correctly, PC GamePass remains the same. In which case I’m keeping my GamePass, but they have succesfully dissuaded me from buying the console.
PC Game Pass also went up. From $11.99/mo to $16.49/mo.
The price is going up, at least in the US. $12 to $16.50 with 50 old Ubisoft games added. A 37.5% increase.
Yes/no. The ‘service’ on PC remains the same. The cost STILL hours up to $30, even without forknife and ubi+, or boosted Cloud gaming.
yeah, well on one hand it wouldn’t have stung that much if it weren’t for the reports all the time how Microsoft is making record earnings and how profitable Game Pass is. Add to that massive layoffs which also increases profits.
Then again it’s how a pal of mine said. Increase the price by 50%. 20% of subsrcibers leave… you still have 30% profit. It’s a gamble they will most likely win.
It’s actually only a 20% profit (150%*80%=120%) but you are right in that they still profit.
Percentages don’t work this way. If you start with $100 and increase it by 50% you get $150. But then if you decrease it by 20%, you’re left with $120, not $130.
I’ve done the math. The increase in profits is only 20% in that scenario. Still, it is an increase in profits.
Correct. 1.5 x 0.8 = 1.2
If that doesn’t seem to make sense for everyone, think about it this way: They’re not getting the full +50% from everyone, they only get the extra 50 from the 80% who stay, which is +40%, AND THEN take away the 20% of people who cancel.
That’s exactly it. People get hung up on losing customers so often that they miss the big picture. I know a guy who bought a paper shredding truck and built a great business out of it, but when he hit his max capacity, instead of spending 2 million dollars on a second truck, he sold the business. The people who bought it immediately doubled the cost, which freed up capacity for new clients because of the cancellations, and they were still making more money off of the remaining clients than he was from the larger client list. Not a defense… Read more »
Everybody is focusing on the Ultimate tier of GamePass, like the wiggling hand of the stage magician. It’s not wrong what has been written here, but I think the real trick is to get a. 28% more from GamePass Core subscribers, and b. to upsell GamesPass Premium to Core subscribers Which kinda doubles the profit from that groupe of subscribers. So, 28% hike on the low tier, 20% of Core players switch to Premium as the price difference narrows, and 20% switch from ultimate to Premium, which gives them another 30% increase from a 50% price hike. I don’t know… Read more »
I feel like they kept the price below profitability level, to get everyone hooked before they jacked it up.
Hey Tim/Comment Section, are the comics Analouge and D-Pad and Starcaster now Patreon only?
I recall that at least one was decided to be Patreon-only, but I’m unsure if all the story comics are on Patreon now. Thanks for the info in advance!
Starcaster has been on Patreon for a while now. Their own Patreon, separate from the main CAD Patreon. 4 new pages every month and the votes are exclusive to backers when they happen. Eventually older issues get uploaded here for all to read.
Analog & D-Pad, no, those are still here. Extra pages are on Patreon, or they eventually get released in the books.
“Sir! The cow is out of milk!”
‘Increase suction.’
I think a huge factor is the fact that there just aren’t enough new games coming out to justify this service at that price. And folks have burned through most of the backlog of old games they would have wanted to try by now. But the price itself is also just pretty wild on its own. I’m sure some executive who thinks that $80-$100 is a fine starter price for a new game figures this is fine, but in this day and age, plenty of us wait for sales before buying some new games, and already have a backlog of… Read more »
Let’s make games that mainly are though to be played on line. To have access to the online gaming service let’s make the players pay. Let’s raise the prices of the subscriptions.
Perfectly designed…
Microsoft saw that poll on Monday and was mad they were too high up the list.
My suggestion that Xbox had already been buried feels spot on.
I wonder how CAD 1.0 Zeke and Ethan would have reacted to this. I doubt they would have been happy.
Plus, that’s comparing initial game prices, not considering the steep discounts you usually get after some quite endurable timeframe.
Right. Wait a while and you get a more patched and polished version of the game. You get any DLC that was later released as part of a complete edition, and you save a buttload of money VS preordering at launch.
I always recognized that Game Pass was a decent deal (it’s clearly not anymore) but never subscribed myself because of this. I don’t buy enough games at release to make it worth it VS just waiting for a sale.
I feel the era of “steep discounts” is the next thing to start drying up. Nintendo already doesn’t discount their games.
How long is the average user playing in gamepass per month? How many games. Easy calculation
Companies doing this always irritates me, partially because it screws us over, but mostly because of how dumb it is. The service is already profitable, they could just leave well enough alone and continue cashing the checks. But no, they always need MORE. The line has to always go up. They must grow infinitely in a world without infinite resources. More more more more, and then they get less because they ruin a perfectly good thing. And every company makes this same short-sighted mistake and never learns. It’s infuriating that not a single person in a position of power has… Read more »
part of the blame has to go to shareholders, who constantly want more and more returns on their investments
As usual, money is weighty. Those with money have accordingly weightier effects on the decisions of these companies, while at the same time, it cushions them from seeing the reality of the world. So ironically, those with the most power in these decisions, tend to make the decisions while being the most blind to the consequences. And also the most well cushioned from those consequences.
Yeah I understand why it plays out like this, but that doesn’t make it any less infuriating. If anything it makes it more infuriating because the people doing this are going to benefit in the end anyway while the rest of us lose out.
I just gotta ask this because it seems that nobody else in the comments seems to be linking this up in their heads. The tier that is going up is Ultimate which will have EAPlay exclusive to it. EA recently got sold to the Saudis/Jared Kushner. Does anyone REALLY think that the first order of business after signing the deal wasn’t “Alright, we gotta make back the money on our investment. Let’s jack the price of EA Play/games.” These things don’t happen in a vacuum. The new owners probably told Microsoft months in advance that the price for keeping EA… Read more »
Yeah, even with the fairly generous math of totaling up the full MSRP of games I played on GamePass and would have likely brough had they not been on GamePass, I did not get $360 worth of value.
I have been a XBOX guy since the OG box….have sub to Gamepass since its inception. After taking a look at my usage over the past year….I went ahead and cancelled. At most I actually am interested in one maybe two games a year. I would rather give all the $$ to the game companies than MS.
Also, to be perfectly honest…I have actually used my PS5 Pro more than the XSX in the last few months so I am probably just done with XBox overall.
I’m now a Ubisoft+ member, and I also don’t play nearly as many games on gamepass as I used to. I’ve been toying with killing it for a while for this same reason. I’m also spending most of my time now on 1-2 games tops. I’m just not the game hopper I used to be. When I signed up for gamepass I was playing a new game every week. Those days are loooooong gone.
I’m with you, the price hike is crazy. I also have a year and probably won’t re-up after it’s been used.
Which is a shame because I probably would never have even heard of some of the great games I have played on Gamepass. Abiotic Factor as a recent example.
Hell, I might have missed out altogether on Subnautica if it wasn’t for gamepass…
This is mostly useful to people who plays a new game every month, and also get sick of those game within a month and never play them again.
xbox Exec: “So what you’re saying is we should also raise the retail price of games to maintain the relative value of GamePass? Brilliant!”
More the share holders and Satya sending out emails that it needs to “make more! Or you’ll be fired! We can have an AI fail at your job!”. While their AI can actually so Satya’s job by now… but of course he stays 😉 .
Game Pass was never a good value. The fact that you have no games at all from your payments as soon as you stop subscribing is the worst “value” you could possibly have
At $30 for gamepass that’s 2 months for most good games, or 1 month for some indie games.
Do I discover a new game I want to play at length more often than that? Nope. I might still buy a month here or there if I want to try a couple of games before committing (Looking at you Starfield) but if I want to put any amount of time into the game, I might as well just buy it at this point.
Capitalism, free enterprise and market forces for the win!
Greed! They name is Microsoft…and EA…and Ubisoft and…crap I don’t have time for this.
Now the era begins where you treat games like you treat new friends. “Yeeeah, I COULD buy a new, unvetted game from a Publisher with a dodgy history… Or… Boot up old reliable.”
Apparently, my sub is going up from 15$ (Canadian) to 16.49$ (also canadian). So uh… I’m okay I guess?
this gave me a chuckle. raised prices enough to kill their systems with people trying to bail.
I want games I can play with a few friends, where we can all get it and play with each other with one of us serving. Not huge MMOs. And I want to not be hammered with ads and with the reality that my games may be shut down because something in the design goes away when somebody other than me decides to shut it down. I’ve really stopped contributing to games that don’t offer a server I can run and one that takes my money once. Games use to work that way. Battletech even has a hack to play… Read more »
Yeah, same for me. GamePass WAS great, but at that price, it’s just gouging me. It runs out in 2026, but I have no intention of renewing unless they fix the price tag. $30 is just greedy.
so how do publishers (and microsoft) make money off gamepass? its in the number of subscriptions, it hedges that they will get enough people to pay for a subscription, and that requires alot of casual users to pay, at $30 they will lose a substantial amount of their casual subs, and that will be the end of it. at least the ultimate. i understand they have lower tiers, but am not sure if those are of much value to the average subscriber?
“owning them outright” hasn’t been a thing, ever, for games. You’re buying a license, not the game. You don’t own anything outright.
its like paying Costo if you only go in once a year
Yeah, Gamepass is at the point where it’s just better to wait for a game to have a permanent drop in price and then go on sale (i.e. the current Steam Autumn sale) before getting it.
Unless you are playing nothing but Gamepass games, then I don’t think it’s worth the value at the price tag of $30 a month.
X,D
But, but players need to get used to not owning games. CEOs said so, so it must be true
I only buy the games I want to play and largely have time to play. Because why rent games I might never play. So I only buy like 4-5 games a year. Maybe 6 tops.
I have not bought one in a few years, but when I did it was just as weekly passes. Which I then applied to my account, as I found that there were weeks where I would not even touch my Xbox. So why pay for that downtime?