Shortly After Xbox Game Pass Prices Spiked, the Page to Cancel Game Pass Subscriptions Was Overwhelmed
Shortly After Xbox Game Pass Prices Spiked, the Page to Cancel Game Pass Subscriptions Was Overwhelmed
I cancelled too! I really wanna see what excuse Microsoft will pull out to walk back the changes.
Hit 'em where it hurts, people.
It's honestly cheaper to just buy games than pay this subscription per year.
Plus, you get to keep the games.
Honestly, I've kinda gone back to buying physical media.
I bought DK Bananza on cart, and guess what? After I finished it, I gave it to my brother. Imagine that! Sharing a game you own? Madness.
I'm eager to pick up Ghost of Yotei from the store this afternoon, as well.
I've never gone away from buying physical media, but I could understand exactly why you would want to return to it.
Knowing Microsoft, I'd like to thing that it went down like this:
Pardon me, your department isn't achieving the expected 20% annual revenue increase.
But we're just selling subscriptions to games that cost us nearly nothing. It's free money.
And you need to make more money from it, increase your subscriber count or your costs, or we'll cut your staff.
Then they cut staff anyways, because why leave free money on the table?
I haven't subbed to gamepads for years because I knew this would eventually happen. Gamepass was designed to get people used to not purchasing games and instead letting them come to them. Subscribers now have to chose between paying even more each month or losing access to the library of games available to them.
Gamepass only ever made sense to people who had time to play or dabble in a sufficiently large amount of games per year and felt the need to play some new titles soon or immediately instead of waiting. Otherwise, eventually your total subscription costs would outpace the total cost to purchase what you played, especially if purchased on sale at a later date. And the value gets worse if you ever replayed a game (s).
I'll never really understand the excitement about this service. It was always a Trojan horse.
Gamepass only ever made sense to people who had time to play or dabble in a sufficiently large amount of games per year
Exactly. I only played two games before unsubscribing. You have to have so many free time to make the gamepass worth your while and money.
I learned after a few months of game pass that most of the games that looked interesting actually weren't. It's no big loss, and it's cheaper to just buy the few games I actually want anymore. Doubly true now.
Buying isn't owning, but it has to be better than this...
It can be if you buy from stores, such as GOG and Itch, that provide DRM-free downloads of games. Even Steam, depending on the game.
I just bought 12 month of Ultimate on eBay. I always did this in the past, because it's cheaper than buying directly from Microsoft. So far, I made good experience with it.
The way it usually works is, that you get a few codes you need to redeem. I got three codes for 36 month of EA Play and then one code for Ultimate that is supposed to transform the EA Play subscription to 12 month Ultimate. But due to the the price hike, the subscription transformation changed as well and I did not get the 12 month.
I'm now in contact with the seller and he tries to find a solution. I want to have my 12 month Ultimate that he offered for the price. But it also sucks for the seller. Seems like we both didn't know. He basically sold it to cheap. I paid 150€ for 12 month Ultimate and he just now increased the price to 200€.
The new prices are insane! 150€ a year is already my upper limit. I'm not gonna pay 200€ or even more a year. I think, if my new subscription is over, I will not extend it. I like the idea of Game Pass, but that's to much money.
The thing is I really like Game Consoles. I want to play in front of my TV. I wish, Steam would make another Steam Machine with Steam OS. I do want an all in one solution. The last thing I want is a gaming PC. I hope, alternatives to Xbox Consoles and Playstation come up.
I know, I could also use the XBox without GamePass, but I do play online something and it would be nice to get away from subscriptions completly.
I wish, Steam would make another steam machine with steamOS
The last thing I want is a gaming PC
The steam machine program was where OEMs could partner with Valve to make a gaming PC that shipped with a steam controller and Steam OS. That's it.
You stated you wanted a steam machine, but also say you don't want a gaming PC, but... That's what a steam machine is
Thanks for clarifying! You are right, I thought they sold complete systems with just Steam OS, like the Steam Deck, but as a console. Seems like I was wrong around it.
Just to make sure: I'm aware one can also use the desktop mode on SteamOS, but it's not really necessary.
Yeah I think some folks get confused and think Steam machines were a Steam based console, but the closest to that is the Steam Deck which admittedly is pretty solid. Though I do think Valve has experimented with making a Steam Console in the past but I don't think it went anywhere, though it also couldve been absorbed into the Steam Deck team.
I mean, you can set up a gaming pc or laptop to mostly work with a controller and have a general interface akin to that of consoles. Retro stuff like Lakka or RetroPie already do it super well. The "set up" part is where you'll likely spend several hours, though
Yeah, but what I love about consoles is the nearly zero maintenance. Updates are installed completly in the background. I work the whole day on IT stuff. I do not want to administrate any system in my free time.
And I like to play some more graphic intensiv games, not only retro stuff.
From this points of view Xbox and Playstation are great. I'm just getting less and less happy with the business model behind it. I'm totally fine with paying for stuff. But I never liked the subscription and the higher the monthly prices get the less attractive it is for me.
Never would I ever subscribe to a game service. That's just me.
you wouldn't? not if the cost and convenience was right? just out of principle, regardless of value?
I could see doing it if I had more time to game
I don't feel good about not having the ability to do what I want with my games; the idea of games being "mine" goes away if I cannot buy, sell, resell, loan, copy, backup, modify or destroy it.
I'm not sure how a digital gaming subscription service can compete with that no matter how cheap or how good the library is or how long the service is proposed to exist.
I justified it as a games rental. I mean I easily paid $5 to rent a game for the weekend in the 90s. Paying 12 bucks to rent games all month long wasn't bad (for PC).
But the price they're charging now, I may as well buy the games I do play, rather than paying for the subscription. The problem for Microsoft is that money is gonna be going to steam instead of them.
same boat. as soon as that service was announced it never made sense to me.
i play a lot of games, but its never at a consistent pace, just makes more sense to buy.
same goes for shit like netflix. im not constantly watching something, so why wouldn't i just buy the movie when i have a movie night.
Pro financial tip: Be a patient gamer. Get the games you are interested in during sales. Fuck FOMO, subscription models and pre-orders.
I always preferred waiting a year for AAA games. Patches, mods, guides and sales.
Even better when GOTY editions or bundles with all the DLC on sale.
Word. Just give me a completed game that is mostly bug free and has all features that are alleged to be part of the game on release.
I agree. But if you are on a console and want to play online, you already need a subscription.
I want a subscription free Console that supports online play.
Lately, I've only been buying indie games. I can't justify dropping $70-$80 on one game and even when those games go on sale they're usually $40-$50.
If you read reviews and do a little research you'll find that there are actually a lot of really cool indie games and you can get multiple games for just a fraction of the cost of double or triple A games.
Yeah, I've got so many more games than I have time to play them that there's never a need to play full price for anything. I wishlist em and pick them up when they're on sale less than £10
I'm usually fine with paying more for things I enjoy that are worth it. Like $70 games are just not a big deal to me.
I'm also too lazy to cancel most things. I've ignored Game Pass price hikes before and justified them by thinking of all the games I played without buying.
But this one is just ridiculous. There's no value here, no way for me to justify it. I was enjoying Silksong on Xbox because I didn't have to buy it, but now that I do have to buy it I guess I'll do that on my Switch instead. Replaying it is going to be rough, especially without my Elite controller.
I hope Microsoft gets their shit together, because Xbox has been my favorite game platform for years.
Just cancelled mine. I have barely been doing ~2 games per year, and the cost was low enough for me to not really care about the months I didn't play at all.
But a price increase is the straw.
You know, fundamentally, I don't hate Gamepass as a concept. "Netflix, but for videogames" is an idea I can get behind, as it widens the audience for something I love by lowering the bar of entry. There are plenty of people out there that benefit from being able to play a few games here and there without needing to commit hundreds of hours to $100 purchases.
But Netflix has overstepped with price hikes and ads, and I've cancelled my service with them. That Microsoft thinks it can charge some ~$40CAD a month is pure hubris. I hope they learn quickly that, at that price point, the enthusiast market will happily cancel and just buy their games outright, and the casual market will decide it's an expense they don't need.
I’m doing my part!
I have never had gamepass, it just seemed like a waste honestly
it WAS a good deal early on. Also when they introduced their partnership with RIOT and it would allow you to unlock all the characters in LoL that was a very good deal if you were a League player.
but the price increases and what have you...meh. it was good to get access to some games and not have to pay full retail for them. I'm thankful I didn't pay full price for Starfield and just played it on gamepass but there would be months on end where there was nothing on there worth playing.
I get the inherent value people attach to it, but after having it several times (I'd have it for a month or two and then drop it for like, a year), I would never go back to it even if it still seemed like a good deal.
For an app developed by Microsoft and working on a PC, it has some awful pathing, and I lost saves and had issues launching games on multiple occasions. Tried many fixes and it never worked out. Some games would work for me, others wouldn't. So for me, since it felt like a toss up to get a game to work, it was pointless.
I canceled. I don’t want the features they added. I don’t even use all the features they charge me for now. I just want to be able to try out so new games every so often. I’ll take the $30 I save and buy those same games, probably with some money leftover
You should start using your brain instead of your wallet and begin torrenting.
For all the money you've wasted renting games with gamepass, you could've been owning them with a fraction of the cost of a VPN.
I understand, but I do want to support devs, especially indie devs, when u can. That’s why I have no qualms about canceling an expensive service and putting that money directly in their hands when it’s possible
The thing about this shit is...
Microsoft, like Google, is now a user-data driven company and they have already made loss/profit ratio analysis on this long before they released the price increase. They're absolutely banking on people cancelling but making up the difference and then some from the people who stay.
For a thought experiment let's consider how many subscribers they were reported to have in Feburary: 34 million. Let's assume that everyone is paying for the highest tier to make the math easier. So current income would be 34 million user x $20 a month and thats $680 million a month. New income of 34 million users x $30 a month is $1.02 billion. The difference is $340 million a month. Let's divide that by $30 a month. That gets us about 11,333,333 users. So they can hemorrhage over 11 million users and still break even. To make sure, let's subtract 11 million users. That gives us 23 million users. 23 million users x $30 a month is $690 million a month, a cool $10 million a month above current profits.
For final context, 11 million users is roughly 32% of their entire subscriber count. They can afford to lose a third of the people subscribing and still make money.
The math doesn't bode well for us who vote with our wallets.
Okay, but wouldn’t a higher price also discourage new people from subscribing in the first place? Or are companies that shortsighted?
Most of them are. Just make profit NOW!!
And it gets even better. Instead of up to 33% leaving, say 50% of that group convert to Premium instead of Ultimate. That isn’t any lost revenue since the price is going up to what Ultimate used to be. So that cushions their numbers even more.
I'm not a licensed math surgeon, but I think your math is wildly optimistic in favor of Microsoft due to how the subscription totals are actually distributed per price tier.
I don't doubt that they did a lot of math to figure out an acceptable level of churn for this change, I just don't think it's nearly as generous and wide as you're calculating.
There probably is a very real churn limit that they're trying to avoid, and my hunch is that there exists a breaking point that could be hit with an aggressive and sustained boycott / cancellation spree, but again, I'm not a math surgeon so I could be wrong. That's just my gut feeling.
One could imagine that conveniently, Microsoft's online support pages and the amount of support staff were designed to only handle hundreds of thousands of cancelations at a time.
I wasn't one of the unsubscribers here but I still can't believe I stuck out on GP for so long back when I did unsub
I already canceled because of the atrocities Microsoft does / is / supports.
Not that the harm hasn't already been done, but I did just see this: https://thisweekinvideogames.com/news/microsoft-pulls-azure-services-from-israeli-military/
Just canceled my 4 year old subscription. Can’t wait to hear the complaints from my kid but Netflix is likely next.
The missus and I sat down about a year ago and tabulated up how much all of the various streaming subscriptions were costing us per year (it was close to $1,000 when including YouTube Premium).
We cancelled every single one, and put that money towards building a home NAS and filling that up with downloaded media. No more ads, stupidly low bitrates, or TV shows & movies disappearing because a license expired.
The server has more than paid for itself at this point, and every additional spare dollar is being put aside for our kids’ tuition.
ETA: Consider doing the same, your kid’ll likely thank you in the long run!
PS: Never too late to introduce them to all of your favourite classic games, either - though that one may be a bit harder to get them onboard 🤣
Never too late to introduce them to all of your favourite classic games, either
Easier if you start with Bomberman Party on the PS1 or the arcade Neo Bomberman. I think those play much better than anything Bomberman released after 2004
If the kid enjoys strategy, starting out with Age of Empires should be easy. Or just leave them messing around with Settlers 2
I have a 16TB server and an extensive steam collection. I already explained it to him and he was fine about it.
The price increase is absurd. I cancelled too, because while I do play quite a bit, this level of corporate greed is completely unjustifiable to me. If rather watch playthroughs of new games on Twitch or YouTube and then buy them a year later on sale than pay this bloody much, eff that.
"watch playthroughs of new games on Twitch of YouTube"
welcome to my life for the last couple of many years lol. Not that I've been boycotting per se, but I haven't bought a new game in years cuz my laptop is over a decade old so the best I can play is minecraft, or just use my xbox one for battlefield 4. the corporate greed from the last decade has caused me to never buy this crap again. I love videogames so much, thank god for emulators.
I don't need any trash EsaudiaA dishes out. People need to go play old/vintage games, get back to the roots, before games were nothing but meaningless cash grabs.
To be fair it‘s as absurd as it was inevitable. Gamepass was always meant as this temporary thing you can try out to play some new games until everyone jumps ship because of increased prices. It has been preached for years. No one could‘ve seriously thought this was a long term alternative to buying games or at least buying licenses to games on Steam. All online subscriptions are scams in the process.
Just so you know, they only thought you were stupid enough to pay more because you were stupid to enough to pay at all.
Use your brain before your wallet. Start torrenting.
Stop being average.
I really appreciate this, you just saved me at least $20.
Microsoft’s user experience is awful at every step in a browser. I wanted to like XBox but it’s clear why they’re losing.
For years I've been warning whoever would listen that XboxGP, much like any other content subscription service owned by a public company would inevitably lead to a massive consumer squeeze. Fortunately it happened before MS managed to metastasise into a monopoly in gaming too. Good riddance.
Turned off my recurring billing. I'll have about 3 months then it's bye bye. I have been a customer since 360, but now will probably sign up for Playstation Network for the first time.
but now will probably sign up for Playstation Network for the first time.
Fucking hell... some people legitimately never learn.
They are destined to be suckers for life.
Oh I'm sorry, did Playstation start charging 30 bucks for their service? Oh, it's actually CHEAPER than Xbox even was? Oh and it's a massive back catalog of PS games I haven't played due to being on Xbox? Fuck me right?
Now is probably not the best time to sell my xbox.... I bet the market is flooding
if costco stop selling xbox(a series) its a bad sign.
Internet is being shitty on link. What is the price increasing to/from? When was the last increase?
It varies by location. But for me on brazil at least every single subscription doubled in price. PC Game Pass was 36 BRL, it is now 70. Ultimate was 60 BRL, now it's 120. I cannot justify this shit.
This link has a pretty good comparison between the new and old gamepass features/prices. The cheapest tier is actually better than it used to be, but it looks like the more expensive ones are getting bundled with shit most people won't want just so they can justify increasing the price.
There are four tiers to the gamepass: Core, Standard, PC, and Ultimate. The first two were exclusive to Xbox, the PC version was obviously exclusive to PCs, and Ultimate was available for both. All tiers aside from the PC gamepass are now being bundled with xbox's cloud gaming, with higher tiers having shorter wait times and better quality.
This is all US pricing, so take it with a grain of salt considering the OP said their prices doubled:
It was nice to have Xbox a month or two a year to play new releases. Guess that it’s over now, no problem, still a patient gamer.
... and here is yet another opportunity I have to post the same comment as I have been doing for the past 6+ months:
People still use Microsoft products?!
Your comment really just shout "i'm living under a rock!"
Yep, me with my years of working for MSFT, playing their games, configuring their software and using it at large businesses... and then realizing its all fucking overpriced broken garbage from first hand experience, and then replacing it all with open sourcr shit both at home and at work...
Yep, I really am sound like live under rock.
I think he's just not an idiot like most of the people who are finally cancelling their subscriptions.
I know, it's rare to find someone who isn't eager to be ripped off.
no numbers were shown that day
Jfc I just downgraded back to Premium. We were paying for Ultimate but never used it. What a great way to force users to look at their subbed to. It's pretty fucking awful to pull this shit with no real announcement.
I work in the IT software licensing industry, it's a fucking cancer I can't wait to fail so bad that when we have the first extended internet outage failure so bad that it shows the world that subscriptions are a liability that shouldn't exist