Xbox Game Pass pricing doesn’t make sense, Microsoft knows it
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It is ironic that what used to feel like a cheat code has now almost become as annoying as a paywall. Over the past 15 months, Microsoft has treated Xbox Game Pass less like a consumer-friendly service and more like an experiment in pricing tolerance. How far can you push before people drop off? The answer, it turns out, is somewhere around two price hikes. Especially when that second jump lands Game Pass Ultimate at ₹1,389 a month. At that point I’d rather just buy 3 games that I like and enjoy them for the rest of my life.
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A leaked internal memo from new Microsoft Gaming CEO Asha Sharma, obtained by The Verge, finally puts it in plain language, Game Pass has become “too expensive for players” and needs a “better value equation.”
And players didn’t need a leaked memo to figure that out. The moment the new pricing kicked in, Reddit threads blew up, X was flooded with complaints, and cancellations followed pretty quickly. Nothing about the service fundamentally changed. Microsoft simply asked people to pay more and hoped the existing library would justify it. It didn’t.
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That’s what makes this frustrating. Because for a long time, Game Pass was the best deal in gaming. Day one releases, a deep back catalogue, cloud gaming, it had everything going for it and on paper, it still does. But subscriptions don’t live on paper, they live on perception. And when you raise prices twice before users have even adjusted to the first increase, that perception flips quickly.
Now the question is whether that acknowledgment turns into action. Because Microsoft does have the lineup to win people back. Titles like Fable, Halo, and Gears of War are exactly the kind of releases that could bring subscribers back into the fold but only if the price makes that decision feel easy again.
Regardless, it’s refreshing to see someone inside Microsoft actually say that out loud.
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