Xbox: "Price Increases Are Never Fun For Anybody"

Never fun for anybody

Meanwhile, at Microsoft:

No, but, but, think of the shareholders! Nobody ever thinks about the shareholders! :(((
- MSFT has been lagging behind the S&P this week. I doubt they're super thrilled.

They're also upping the sub price for some home user office plans. Apparently it's milk the customer time at microsoft.

Part of the problem is that most of the people making these decisions have been seeing their incomes and net worth increase steadily over the past decade. They don't truly understand their subscriber base.
- But they do understand "charge what the market will bear". It's all about short term profit.
Thanks for letting me know, I've been paying just for some spare OneDrive space but I think I'll cut it if they're raising the price
- My boss showed me the article yesterday, but apparently it's the old news from earlier this year. It went from 70 to 100 back in Feb.
  That's still a giant increase from whatever you would have paid last year.

Xbox: "Price Increases Are Never Fun For Anybody"

Meanwhile Xbox execs:

I remember when GamePass was first announced and everybody lauded Microsoft for being “pro-consumer” and outright cheered when they started buying up independent studios.

I remember being downvoted to oblivion for pointing out the very obvious 5 year plan for GP and the fact that it would go… exactly the way it’s currently going.

I've been in the fuck subscriptions camp. Sony locking multiplayer behind PS+ was wha5 led me to dropping consoles as my primary gaming system, since I refused to pay for multiplayer.
- I don’t mind subscriptions for ongoing infrastructure as much. My problem is with using a subscription to replace ownership.
- Tbf when Xbox first launched console multiplayer there was a monthly fee too.
  That was anti-consumer from the get-go but it was also there from the start.
I never understood the praise at all. It's literally turning DRM into a business model.
- Lol that's always been the business model
- It's because it was pretty much the Netflix of video games. Pay a subscription and you get access to a collection of games.
  When it was 5.99 it was a no brainer. I think I cancelled mine around 13.99, though not because of the price but because I always forgot it existed and it tied me to windows. Switched to Linux and cancelling was a part of that transition.
Yep. Same thing with netflix.
The average consumer is a moron, so their complacency is irrelevant in determining what's a good deal.
- Yep in this thread I've been arguing with someone who is saying consoles have to charge for online because it is so expensive... Yet, on PC for platforms like Steam and Epic despite also hosting game downloads and having multiplayer games they don't charge.
  Just goes to show how some consumers after being so used to not having flexibility and lack of restrictions when it comes to products become convinced it is necessary.
I feel like I responded to this exact comment on Reddit years ago saying the same. The thing people don't realize, is subscriptions give you zero control of ownership and it's always in the best interest of the corp to bait and switch.
At the time, I predicted you were probably right - but it would still be a good value for the time that the price stayed low.
- Exactly, it was great at 11.99 IMO. As soon as I got the email saying a 50% increase, I cancelled. Surely they knew there would be cancellations but I'm not sure they knew there would be that many.
No doubt in my mind M$ employs obfuscated layers of (contracted) marketing to astroturf, including downvotes of your cautionary comments. The line between a fanboy and astroturfer is blurred.
Gaining subscribers/customers while bleeding money, then charging more money once your competitors are forced out of the market or investors want to cash out, is a basic strategy... I doubt Game Pass was ever profitable, it was all an illusion propped up by accounting tricks and obfuscated/discounted internal operating costs (where M$ can shift xbox costs to money-printing cloud services division).
No doubt after years of failed xbox, that Phil Spencer is just a corporate suit executing the vision of M$ as a whole (in which Games is just an inconvenient detail). Expect more of the same, bundling of other services, no actual good in-house games. Activision acquisition in part of this strategy to pump up Game Pass, since M$ internal studios have not produced anything noteworthy this generation. I expect the next xbox to have cheaper hardware to undercut ps6, but to have increased game pass incentives to make up for it. maybe a random bundle with netflix. you gotta think outside of the (x)box for whats coming next.

Sacrifice the future for a temporary revenue/profit go up

No, it will work out for them. They just made a 50% profit increase. I doubt if even 10% of subscribers cancel.
It worked for Netflix, Disney+, Hulu... People just need to stop buying shit, but they won't.
Even though I personally never used it I was astonished at how quickly so many people blindly trusted it. What I'm more astonished with is how quickly Microsoft has managed to destroy that brand trust.

Raising the price of hardware twice since May and now raising the price of game pass by 50% is not something a company would do if they're interested in competing against Sony or Nintendo. Clearly Microsoft has thrown in the towel on XBOX. Only thing left for Microsoft to do is announce cancellation of next gen console altogether and do layoffs. I don't know when that will happen but it's inevitable at this point.

yup they'll go the route of Sega. The writing has been on the wall with the Xbox Division for awhile now that I'm honestly surprised they're still trying to "make it work".
Xbox was a weird one. I haven't used one since the 360 and honestly I couldn't even begin to tell you what the next console in the line was after the 360. was it the series x? was it the one? I dont' know. I mean after buying like 5 360s because of red ring or whatever why would I continue that idiocy?
- Lol yeah the naming was incredibly bad. But I'm pretty sure it was 360 -> one -> series. I only owned the original one (not the One one) and a 360 which luckily was unaffected by RRoD.
  I think the 360 was really good all things considered, it was a good console at the time and MS actually helped getting smaller studios their stuff into the store with summer of arcade. It also captured a lot of interest from third party studios. All in all pretty solid. Damn shame that the RRoD tainted the console so much.
  Segmenting the market after into S and X was a really dumb move in my opinion. The other one was trying to turn it into an entertainment machine instead of a game console (TV, TV, TV, sports...)
Raising the price of hardware twice since May and now raising the price of game pass by 50% is not something a company does if they're interested in competing against Sony or Nintendo.
But when Sony and Nintendo are doing the same thing...?
- got any source for that on the nintendo side? Idc about sony.

Canceled.

It's fun for the people making more profit.

They've made very clear that they're reducing functionality, dropping products including their gaming companies, and raising prices across the board to somehow come up with billions for AI. They no longer care about their customers or employees, only this holy grail quest for money that will evaporate. Dump Microsoft.

And they'll get away with it because of how many businesses chose to become dependent on microsoft.

Microsoft was never going to make gaming affordable. The entire goal of GP is like any subscription service, to get you hooked so they can increase the prices. Microsoft is not and never was a pro consumer company. And GamePass is Microsoft’s attempt at making a hardwareless console. It’s a BYOD walled garden. It’s bad for consumers and bad for developers and publishers. Consumers will own nothing and studios are beholden to MS gatekeepers. Some account manager basically decides how much the devs will be financially compensated before the game is even released, instead of letting the market decide. Remember those court documents which showed how much they under valued Baldur’s Gate 3. If you think the standard 30% store cut is outrageous GamePass is on another level of bad. Sure they are currently showering devs in cash, but once MS has a significant chunk of the market they are going to turn off that tap. We’ve seen it with Netflix and Spotify. Like even the most popular artists earn fractions of cents per user.

The very definition of enshittification:
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two-sided market", where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

but we're trying to reinforce by adding more value to these plans as well."
Fortnite Crew and Ubisoft+ Classics

So if you don't play Fortnite and aren't interested in 15 different Assassin's Creed titles, fuck you I guess

Imagine, if you will, the possibility of NOT increasing prices 50% to give us the "additional value" of shit we don't want.
I was happy paying for games, but suddenly I'm extremely willing to get back into piracy. Fucking weird, right?
Apparently those titles are as or more valuable than half of the entire catalog, how can you not be excited‽

You're selling an underpowered console that spies on the home for 800usd. Stfu about the price being tough on the company

It's something we don't take lightly, and we're listening to the feedback of players and the community to try to provide them with more of what they’re asking for.

God they will never understand that we see right through their bullshit corpo-speak answers will they. Everything they just said is nothing. They don't take it lightly. They are listening. They will try. There is nothing concrete in that wet paper towel of an answer.

How do they think that shit still works?

Especially for the companies who disappear because they were too greedy.

I'm trying to think of a single example and I'm struggling
- McDonald's is the most clear cut example, although that's ongoing
  There's been countless little companies that sent themselves into death spirals with a price hike, but when they're big their remains are pounced on, or they experience a slow decline before collapsing to a failed pivot

Except your CEO the boardroom and the shareholders

While they might or might not have reasons to raise prices, those people who cancelled their subscriptions definitively had their reason.

Yeah, it's too expensive.

Lol, but here's one anyway. - Microsoft

So, if there had been no cancellations and their customers had just paid their bills without comment or criticism, they'd still have been telling us how terrible they felt about the whole thing?

Bovine Excrement.

Infinite growth is impossible, so they switched to squeezing something until it breaks, then identifying the next thing to squeeze. Eventually, they run out of things to squeeze, and switch to squeezing the people directly.

And it started with convincing console gamers it is necessary to pay for multiplayer. Whole ecosystem has been about trying to squeeze consumers for all the money they have. Even the locked proprietary hardware feeds into it of normalizing lack of control over hardware.
But, it is Microsoft at the top so not surprising.

I need to rewatch Muppet* Treasure Island at some point. Such an awesome film.

Look at that added value, tho

Is it fair to blame 343 Studios' incredibly, laughably incompetent handling of the Halo franchise for this? And by this I mean the obvious death of the Xbox as a gaming platform. Or, from a different perspective, could Halo have actually saved the Xbox if the games had been amazing, or even just good?

Possibility. Halo is a huge title and they trashed it. They should have finished out halo wars and odst trilogy and start one for the arbiter.

Thank you captain obvious?

So a dumb question: last email stated, if there be any changes in costs, they will notify me 60 days prior but I still haven't got anything from M$... Aren't they running head first into an giant lawsuit in Europe? Still going to cancel the subscription though

Yeah, £15 was pushing it, I don't play as much as I'd like, big benefit was cloud gaming facilitating couch co-op, but at the minute it's mostly my kids playing Minecraft, cheaper just to buy that.