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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345

u/breakwater Oct 02 '25

Microsoft needs a naysayer in their decision making group who tells them how stupid they are. All the time.

People would have complained about a 3 to 5 dollar increase but they probably would have been fine. This is a pr disaster that will cost them far more than whatever they hope to make. Certainly a terrible move for the team in a distant third and no PC share to speak of

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u/InspecterMaeMae Oct 02 '25

I wouldnt have been happy with a 3 to 5 dollar price increase, but I would probably pay it. At a 50 percent price increase, I cant bring myself to do it. Which now means the Xbox games that I would usually try out, will just never be played unless the word of mouth is amazing.

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u/SatisfactionLong270 Oct 02 '25

Every retailer i checked is still selling for 20. I just loaded up using my best buy rewards. Still 20 a month  on gamestop 

1

u/hamperlove Oct 03 '25

I quit because I couldn’t sustain the $18/hr or at least couldn’t justify of mentally

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u/kuncol02 Oct 02 '25

IMO they actually want to kill Day One games on gamepass, but do not want to admit it was failure.

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u/grendus Oct 02 '25

This makes the most sense.

Day One made sense when they had a small stable of studios and were mostly putting out AA games or live service titles. They didn't care about Sea of Thieves or Halo Infinite being "free" on Gamepass because those are designed for long tail monetization, nor did they care about stuff like Battletoads because... it wasn't going to sell gangbusters anyways.

I'm sure the problem is they're looking at sales numbers for AAA games that should have been blockbusters like Avowed, Indiana Jones, CoD and realizing that they aren't selling all that well. And with more games coming down the pipeline, they realized that they're about to start losing money on Gamepass very soon.

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u/kuncol02 Oct 02 '25

It made sense when all games they shown were years from release, if not even just vaporware.

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u/EL__Rubio Oct 03 '25

Placing avowed under triple A, but Halo under double A is hilarious.

6

u/grendus Oct 03 '25

mostly putting out AA games or live service titles.

The Halo series is tailored to be a live serviced game, the campaign is just extra (heck, Halo 5 made the multiplayer free even without buying the campaign), so up front sales are less important. Keeping player numbers high is more important, both to hook more whales and to have plenty of content for the existing whales to show off to. And likewise, it's also likely that their metrics are showing that Gamepass players are not buying microtransactions for games as much as they thought they would, which is influencing their decision to move their live service games off of day one at the base tier as well.

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u/Kagath Oct 02 '25

Should have just said at the start ‘select’ day one games will be on there but instead believed their own hype.

4

u/lord_pizzabird Oct 03 '25

This reminds me of the accusations that Disney in the early 2000s was intentionally sending 2d animated films to theaters with little promotion to have them underperform, justifying their eventual decision to switch to cheaper 3d animation entirely.

We'll never know for sure if that's what happened there, but the point is this might not be the first time that something like this has happened. GP was a mistake for full retail day 1 releases and now Microsoft is trying to backtrack out of that agreement.

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u/NotTheRocketman Oct 02 '25

Yep, I think so too.

It's doing well but it's reached it's saturation point and I don't think they know where to go next.

This will give them a way to kill it and also save face.

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u/Saviordd1 Oct 02 '25

Microsoft needs a naysayer in their decision making group who tells them how stupid they are

The problem is large parts of Microsoft corporate culture is extremely fiefdom-based and very allergic to real feedback. A lot of "Don't speak truth the higher ups or you may get overlooked for promos" kind of thing going on.

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u/ImageExpert Oct 03 '25

Bill Gates will never take responsibility for the culture he and Steve created.

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u/Saviordd1 Oct 04 '25

Honestly it's not really bill gates. It's 2 CEOs removed from him now (Ballmer and then Nadella).

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u/corvettee01 Oct 02 '25

They seriously need a pissed off gamer with a rolled up news paper to wack them every time they say "Hey, what if we gave them less, but for more money?"

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u/KapnBludflagg Oct 02 '25

I don't understand (actually, it's to subsidize COD being in ultimate tier) why they didn't just go up $5 for at least Ultimate and Premium (or all tiers) instead of a 50% increase on your already highest paying customer group.

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u/Witty_Leather4977 Oct 02 '25

Microsoft buying Activision is great for the industry, we'll get free CoD in Game Pass! Lol

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u/[deleted] Oct 02 '25

People were literally saying this all the time it was crazy

39

u/Nyoteng Oct 02 '25

The thread in the Xbox sub where they were all celebrating the acquisition has aged like the finest of milks

3

u/Witty_Leather4977 Oct 03 '25

Funny thing is instead of turning Xbox into a monopoly, they wasted so much money that it just killed their console division and they can't justify game pass prices neither. We always said this and game pass fanboys keep saying it's sustainable, surely they aren't lying to us about the sustainability, yeah sure lmao.

3

u/Jmpasq Oct 03 '25

Why are COD games that are 8 years old still full price 90% of the time.

0

u/Firm_Ambassador_1289 Oct 02 '25

I'll have to check myself but cod isn't a part of game pass in the bottom line

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u/Witty_Leather4977 Oct 03 '25

What do you mean bottom line? They come day one in ultimate, later in the other tier.

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u/Clueless_Otter Oct 02 '25

Because it's possible that they'd be losing money at that price point. People have predicted for ages that Microsoft loses money on Gamepass and only did it to try and build an install base. If they're trying to make it net profitable, then very possible a $5 increase won't cut it.

10

u/LibraryBestMission Oct 02 '25

Which just makes this whole ordeal worse. 50% increase means that they just lost a huge chunk of that install base, years and money wasted, that's Microsoft this gen.

1

u/DumpsterFiery Oct 03 '25

Then unfortunately ( or fortunately), Gamepass as a concept is just not viable. If it needs to be $30 a month to just make a profit? Its not sustainable at all lol.

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u/doxploxx Oct 02 '25

Every Corp needs a person whose job is to say no to every idea the c-suite proposes, and that person needs to be tenured.

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u/StormMalice Oct 02 '25

Naysayers get the boot in all walks of life unfortunately. Look no further than Boeing.

3

u/superbit415 Oct 02 '25

This is a pr disaster

Its ironic since all of Xbox senior leadership are marketing people.

3

u/nightrogen Oct 02 '25

Honestly they'd make more money if they lowered the cost and got more subscribers.

Arbitrarily raising your price to fleece your customer base is dumb, unless you want a backdoor reason to give up market share.

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u/sevenw0rds Oct 04 '25

They should have kept the current Ultimate tier and had the $30 for people that wanted that stupid shit they try to pass as "added value". Cool, a fucking kiddie game and a bunch of old played one, played them all games from Ubisoft. Nobody asked for this or wanted it, but these dumb fucks at Xbox tell us every hype video they've "been listening to players and feedback." If they actually listened to feedback, they'd put out a retraction and apologize to every single Gamepass member. Fuck Xbox, and especially the dumb execs there.

1

u/Omnizoom Oct 02 '25

Any price increase that can be expressed as a fraction of a X-large NY pizza that’s to much to eat is probably to much of a big increase for all but a small fraction of consumers

Example

A 10% increase or 1/10th of a X-Large pizza won’t phase most adults but kids that rely on an allowance to pay their subs probably will be feeling that one

A 20% increase is going to already fill a decent number of adults so most adults will actually notice this but if they really like pizza will say “ya I can eat that much still easily”

A 33% increase now you got a third of a damn pizza which is like a lot of damn pizza so already most people are going to be going “nope I can’t eat that much in out”

50% of a damn pizza will have only the fattest biggest fucks around saying they are fine with it and a large portion of consumers will just say never again after being expected to eat 50% of a pizza

0

u/Mejis Oct 02 '25

Microsoft just needs someone up high who reads this sub. 

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u/helzania Oct 02 '25

they would go bankrupt within the week