This morning, Xbox revealed in a press release on their blog that they are once again increasing the price of Game Pass, and this time they may have actually hit a breaking point. The service once hailed as “the best value in gaming” has separated out into 3 tiers that are reminiscent of competitor PlayStation Plus, with Essential, Premium, and Ultimate. Here’s the kicker: the Ultimate tier of Game Pass, which is the only tier that gets you Xbox games on release date, has moved from $20 USD to $30 a month, effective right now.
Even excluding the ridiculousness of a 50% price increase for any service at all, it is finally clear that Xbox’s reach has exceeded its grasp. When Xbox fully launched Game Pass 6 years ago, for just $10 a month players could explore a library of more than 300 games on PC or Console. Notably, this included all Xbox first party games, which included dozens of $60 USD titles from franchises like Halo, Gears of War, Forza, and of course Minecraft. Since then, all of Xbox’s premium games (now at $70 USD a pop) have shown up on the service day one, including massive games like Starfield and Call of Duty. At one time, this was an unbelievable deal for consumers.
Last year, Xbox shuttered 4 of its studios, including the creators of their best game of the generation. After the $80 billion acquisition of Activision-Blizzard-King was finalized in early 2024 in the largest merger in American history, Xbox finally found it was time to pay the piper. Their response to finding themselves in such large debt was to layoff thousands of people across Xbox Game Studios, Bethesda, Activision, and Blizzard while posting record-high revenue every quarter. The mass layoffs continued, hitting 650 Xbox employees in September 2025 and a whopping 9,000 Microsoft employees in July 2025. As a bonus, they closed their studio The Initiative and cancelled the Perfect Dark remake five years into development. In the same breath, Microsoft proudly announced that Game Pass had reached record-high revenue, bringing the company $5 billion USD in FY 2025.
So here we are with Game Pass, which now costs $30 a month to access Xbox games on day one, the entire draw of the service in the first place. Many of the people who worked hard to bring us these games are jobless now as repayment for doing good work. Putting aside the loss of talent at Xbox Game Studios, let’s examine what possible reason there could be for this price increase and why it makes no sense. Here’s the root of the issue: shareholders and investors demand that profits grow every quarter. To anyone with half a brain, it is obvious that this idea is unsustainable. Nothing can grow forever. This also has not stopped every company that gets large enough from pursuing it, leading to famous crashes in the tech sector like the Dot Com Crash.
The last officially reported milestone for Game Pass was 25 million subscribers in January 2022, but a project manager listed a number of 35 million subscribers total this past summer on his LinkedIn page. Let’s say this 35 million number is correct, which groups in everyone who was on the now-defunct Xbox Live Gold plan previously and is now on the “Game Pass Essentials” plan. In their court documents during the Activision acquisition trial, Xbox listed their goal of having 100 million Game Pass subscribers by 2030. As we near the end of 2025, eight years into the lifespan of this service, it is very hard to imagine where the remaining 65 million subscribers are going to come from.
Here is the reality that Xbox must accept and has firmly stated today they will never accept: Xbox Game Pass has reached its saturation point. There are no people left to reach. There are no new markets to break into. They can squeeze a few existing Fortnite players into the Ultimate tier with their new inclusion of its battle pass, and perhaps coax in some Assassin’s Creed diehards with the Ubisoft+ games being added. But Xbox has hit the wall that has always existed in front of them, rammed full speed into it, and driven right off a cliff’s edge by increasing the price of an already very hard sell by $10. It’s not unique to them – it’s nothing that Netflix hasn’t done before, locking 4K streaming behind a $25 a month tier and disallowing families in different households to share accounts. There is no more market.
It is not that Game Pass doesn’t have value. There’s a lot of value there still for $30 a month, if you just look at the numbers. But think for a moment about how much value one human could reasonably extract from the service in 30 days. If you paid $500 for some sort of Olive Garden Pass Ultimate where you can get unlimited food for a month, you must notice that you cannot possibly extract the value of that deal without great stress to yourself and disruption of your life. And also high cholesterol. In the same way, getting access to hundreds of high quality games is awesome for $30 – but how much can you actually play Game Pass games in a month? What’s the hour to dollar proposition that makes it worth it to you? How much are you going to disrupt your daily life and routines to really make Game Pass worth $30 a month in real life?
The answer, for most people, is that it simply isn’t. I do believe a good chunk of people will simply move down to the $15 a month Premium Plan, which still gives access to a wide host of excellent third party and indie games. It seems that a great deal more are simply canceling the service altogether, so much so that this morning when the announcement was made the Microsoft Subscriptions page went down because so many people were trying to cancel Game Pass at the same time. Perhaps they will care. They probably will not. Xbox finally owns Call of Duty and Fallout and a hundred other franchises, is incredibly far in debt, and has no recourse to make that money back. What’s next, Phil?
Xbox has been dragging us all along for a while now, just the same as every other streaming service. The business model is predicated on you subbing for something big, like Wandavision for Disney Plus or House of the Dragon for HBO Max and then simply staying subbed for all eternity because the average person is far too tired to do a value proposition for all their subscriptions on a monthly basis. They want you to use it like you use Netflix, having it just to have something to browse when you have downtime, pick something up for a few episodes, shrug, and go to sleep. Maybe eat some string cheese before bed. Video games simply don’t work like this and never have, offering everything from two hour emotional indie experiences that will make you see God to 200 hour open-world checklists.
Unless you start scheduling a minimum number of hours to game on Game Pass specifically each month, you are not going to reach the value proposition for it. And it’s normal that this value proposition is not something you have thought about for a while, just like the only time you thought about whether to keep yourself subbed to Apple TV Plus was when the price hiked early this year. The dominoes are falling now, and longtime subscribers are realizing not only that the $30 they’ll have to pay isn’t worth it – the $20 they were paying every month since they used Game Pass for Indiana Jones last December wasn’t worth it either.
Sure, you can sub for a month later this year and try to plow through The Outer Worlds 2 in 30 days for $30, but are you going to? Are you that sure life won’t get in the way, the way it does every day? The only way to make it work is to enter, as the kids are saying, “sicko mode.” And you deserve better than that. We work hard at our respective jobs to make money so that we can fund our hobbies, families, and time with friends. Game Pass is going to force you to make it a second job, except this time you’re the one paying to have it to make it worth it. Don’t do that. Buy the games you’re excited for, enjoy them as your life permits, and eat that string cheese.
Xbox knows all of this. They know the Game Pass party bus is hurtling into the abyss, subscribers diving out headfirst, with no landing in sight. They will lie and say that they know what they are doing. They don’t. Master Chief is passing out gummies in the back of the bus and the Vault Boy is doing tricks on the pole – but is it worth paying for the gas to sit there and just watch them?
The time has come! We have to use our greatest weapon as consumers now, something that I myself do less frequently than I should, and really consider what we are paying for. You’ve been waiting for something to hit you in the head and ask you if you actually want to renew Game Pass. Well, here it is. Do you play $30 of Game Pass in a month? Do you even want to?
