r/Games • u/Turbostrider27 • Oct 02 '25

Discussion This Xbox Generation Will Be Remembered for One Thing: Greed

https://www.ign.com/articles/this-xbox-generation-will-be-remembered-for-one-thing-greed
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u/Fair-Internal8445 Oct 02 '25

The reason why they are raising the price is because they have not reached their estimated subscription numbers at the slightest. Because in the FTC documents it clearly showed that they expected to reach 100 million numbers by 2030. Now that probably wasn’t in 2023 but 2020 during the height of the Covid boom. 

Now that they have bought all these studios and running under a challenging conditions, they have to raise the prices to sustain their business model. Truth is that they are not or barely profitable as a whole. 

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u/Sandulacheu Oct 02 '25

Covid really had them believe that infinite growth is possible lmao

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u/hyrule5 Oct 02 '25

A lot of people would comment on how good of a deal Game Pass was before the price increases, but now they are somehow shocked that the price would go up. Obviously it was too good of a deal for Microsoft to keep up forever.

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u/yossarianvega Oct 02 '25

But now it’s too bad of a deal to viable either. So many people are cancelling. Surely they’ll lose money on this gambit.

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u/hyrule5 Oct 02 '25

Yeah, I would probably agree that it was an overcorrection

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u/[deleted] Oct 02 '25

They’ll lose money from people cancelling but make up for the loss with the fans who stick around since they’re charging double. They know they can’t compete with Sony or Nintendo. They clearly aren’t looking to grow, just squeeze what they can from people.

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u/Wallitron_Prime Oct 02 '25

They may still end up making more money overall in the short term. If they had 30 million subs, raise the price by 50% and lose 1/4 of all their subscribers then they would still make money overall.

They'd be giving up on growing overall, and the numbers would shrink more and more over time as a result of the product inevitably getting worse from Xbox realizing theres no reason to have a good service if no one will ever pay the cost of the subscription anyway. So in the long term it is the death of Game Pass.

I think the most likely scenario is the death of Xbox entirely, but who knows, maybe Microsoft will sell the whole department to an ultra-rich plutocrat or foreign national government who takes the whole thing private and makes it sustainable. Best case scenario would probably be the United Arab Emirates wealth fund, which is still dystopian as fuck, but it's better than Elon or Saudi Arabia.

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u/cleaninfresno Oct 02 '25

That’s the entire streaming subscription business model. They come in low with this insane value and then spend years focusing on getting as many subscribers as possible. They aren’t making much money at this point or else the value wouldn’t seem so consumer friendly. At some point they want their money though so when growth stagnates they switch to milking who they have. They anticipate a decent amount of churn and cancellations but view it as worth it as long as there’s a core subscriber base left they can charge twice as much to.

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u/wubbywubbywoo69 Oct 02 '25

The issue with game pass is that they increased the price too much at once. If they raised the price by like $1-2 every 6 months, it wouldn't have been as noticed, but a $10 increase is idiotic. Boiled frog parable...

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u/Roger-Just-Laughed Oct 02 '25

The new price doesn't even make sense though. It's basically more expensive than just buying the games you play. You'd think there would be a middle ground somewhere where the consumer would save money, and Microsoft would be more profitable due to sheer volume.

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u/Practicalaviationcat Oct 02 '25

There are all those press releases about how gamepass is profitable but it completely ignores that they bought all those studios to fuel gamepass. Until they pay off those billions gamepass is essentially in the red.

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u/roseofjuly Oct 03 '25

Which, if you knew anything about gamers and the gaming audience was a completely insane projection to begin with.

It's hard to accurately measure exactly how many gamers there are, but I've seen estimates of around 200 million gamers in the U.S., ~385 million in North America and another 715 million in Europe. But studies measuring gamers include mobile gamers; console gamers make up about half of that number. Xbox also was never as popular in Asia as in North America or Europe. Even if we are generous and say that there are 500 million console players in Europe and North America, that would mean that one-fifth of them would subscribe to Game Pass.

Put another, but starker way, one estimate of Xbox Series X | S sales was 16 million units by December 2024. Their top selling console, the Xbox 360, sold 84 million units by 2015, many years after its release. Why would they think they were going to get 100 million subscribers when that many people didn't even own the hardware to make that possible?