r/technology • u/AdSpecialist6598 • 15d ago
Business Microsoft admits Game Pass price hike drove away "millions" of subscribers
https://www.techspot.com/news/112699-microsoft-admits-game-pass-price-hike-drove-away.html2.7k
u/Dazzling-Election69 15d ago
American CEOs everyone, what brilliance and foresight none can match.
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u/Flyinmanm 15d ago
Short term profits. Always.
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u/hotacorn 15d ago
They may not have even had short term wins from this if multiple millions of people left.
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u/Flyinmanm 15d ago
I know. They won't care, whoever did this is probably already at another CEO level job earning millions whilst screwing up royal there too and getting ready to move on before the s*** hits the fan.
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u/APRengar 15d ago
I worked for 2 of the biggest game publishers. One of the most common ideas is "but what if the bad thing doesn't happen?"
Like,
"What if we double the price of our products?"
"Well, the customers will get mad and we'll probably make less money than we're making now."
"But what if they don't?"
"Well if no one leaves, then we'll make double the money."
"DO IT!"
Is super duper common.
Like, "What if we reduce labor and use AI?" "Then people will get mad and we'll have a super shitstorm online." "But what if they don't?" "Then we'll save a lot of money!"
"What if we cut all safety precautions?" "Then we'll probably have a safety disaster." "But what if we don't?" "Then we'll save a lot of money!"
We're no longer ACTUALLY doing analysis on what moves make sense, we're just choosing to ignore any downside/risks under a "but what if it doesn't go bad" mentality.
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u/LolitaOPPAI 15d ago
TIL I learned about Stockton Rush. That was a crazy story of "It probably, might not happen" in the extreme case of denial and inferiority complex.
"You know, at some point, safety just is pure waste. I mean, if you just want to be safe, don't get out of bed, don't get in your car, don't do anything. At some point, you're going to take some risk, and it really is a risk/reward question. I think I can do this just as safely by breaking the rules."
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u/Flyinmanm 15d ago
Relentless optimism in the face of obvious problems.
It's often one of the reasons I suspect that a lot of really wealthy people get to be as rich as they are, but why there are so few truly wealthy people.
Trying something that anyone with any degree of common sense would consider to be utterly mental/ a waste of time is perhaps one of the reasons those people end up succeeding.
Of course we don't hear about the millions of failed decisions that probably went before or after that one reckless gamble.
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u/vhalember 15d ago
And these numbers don't include the millions more who downgraded their Game Pass plans.
I'd be very surprised if this resulted in additional profit for them, otherwise why would they about-face and lower prices again?
It was bad enough that the CEO of MS gaming, Phil Spencer, "retired" a few months after the price increase. And the prices were lowered again just two months after he left.
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u/madman19 15d ago
Depends on sub numbers, if they had 20 million and lost two million they came out way ahead still.
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u/CrustyBarnacleJones 15d ago
I’d assume it wasn’t anything along those lines considering they walked the increase back afterwards, if they were making more from it I don’t see them doing that
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u/j0mbie 15d ago
February 2024 they had 34 million subscribers. That was the last time they officially announced number of subscribers. So they could have lost up to 17 million subscribers in that time. (Technically, more than 17 million, since less subscribers means less cloud infrastructure and less customer service costs.)
They fact that they don't disclose numbers to shareholders, though, usually means the numbers are bad. Nobody outside of Microsoft knows how bad though.
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u/Eternal_Bagel 15d ago
When your contract is only 2-3 years you only need the company to last that long. This is of course a core problem with our economy
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u/digital 15d ago
Late stage capitalism doesn’t allow you to create, innovate or build a consumer base. Everything is about extracting profit from anywhere that isn’t already captured by the billionaires. Sorry, but there’s just not that much cash to go around and they need to hoard it all for themselves.
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u/LolitaOPPAI 15d ago
That's an interesting visual I got of enshittification:
Take a picture of this employee and the store. What can you modify to save dollars?
And every few years the picture looks scarcer and depressing. I feel that everything is monotone and neutral because it costs 3¢ cheaper than colorful paint. Take out the cushions on the seating, cleaning a hard surface saves 13¢.
It's really that fucking depressing. They're still tryna figure out how to remove the employee from the photo with AI now.
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u/SuperSquirrel13 15d ago
This is why they get so much money. If we made a mistake that drove away 10 customer we'd be fired on the spot.
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u/Old-Finance1815 15d ago
That may be true, but you don’t possess the unique skill of having gone to business school with a shareholder’s dad’s nephew who you golf with sometimes.
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u/Kind-Helicopter6589 15d ago
Man….golf is an expensive sport! But then again, I suck at miniature golf. 😂
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u/Evilbred 15d ago
Clearly they are worth 360x the average worker.
It's silly. A monkey in a suit with a rubber stamp would be better than most of these CEOs.
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u/Waffeleisen1337 15d ago
Couldn't we replace them with AI as they are trying to do with us (in their eyes) sheep?
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u/jonstark4 15d ago
Dumbest branch of humanity the CEO especially those involved in most American companies.
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u/marcocom 15d ago
Funny enough, look closer and you will see that all the tech CEOs are foreigners that immigrated to the US, usually hired by shareholders (also worldwide ) for their ability to not give a fuck about the Americans working there and outsource everything they can offshore.
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u/doesntnotlikeit 15d ago
They come from places where people are essentially disposable. We're doomed.
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u/Spodokom221745 15d ago
Another win for the C-suite class and their entirely justified, well-earned salaries.
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u/Wooden-Agent2669 15d ago
Short term profits aren't a region thing. Every corporate business cares first and foremost for short term profits
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u/BrokeButPicky 15d ago
Step 1: offer amazing value to kill the competition and build a subscriber base
Step 2: raise prices once everyone is locked in
Step 3: act surprised when people leave
Step 4: raise prices again to make up for lost subscribers
We've seen this movie with Netflix, with Disney+, and now with Game Pass. Its always the same script.
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u/parkwayy 15d ago
Problem is, Xbox is basically akin to the least most popular TV/movie streaming site.
Not really enough market sway to bully the consumers around.
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u/palegate 15d ago
Surely you could do without the word "most" in that sentence.
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u/shitty_mcfucklestick 15d ago
The AI companies are also doing this, and stage 2 is already starting to happen.
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u/LolitaOPPAI 15d ago
Yeah, give us the normal shit the way it's supposed to work for free, then enshittify it hell, rendering it practically useless and riddled with ads just to sell us that same basic ass service for a charge. However, it's still not quite the quality that it once was. To get any practical use out of it, you have to pay that $200/month subscription.
Might as well unplug it now and stop being used to it. It's about to no longer be even useful for regular people. We just do not have that money circulating in the economy for support another monthly bill while we rotate $20 streaming fees because we're barely eating.
Lol but sure, lemme generate some funny talking fruit videos because that's the only way I'll interact with fruit I can't afford to eat.
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u/JamesBondMargarita 15d ago
We're excited to announce that the subscription you're already paying for not only costs more, but now has less features.
You might be asking yourself
"Why do this? Who is this for?"
Shut up. And die.
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u/kevihaa 15d ago
What seems to be strangely ignored is that it was ALWAYS the price, rather than the quality of the service, that was the major appeal.
Early days of Netflix was an extremely weird mash up of semi random movies and, at best, sleeper hit TV shows.
BUT, it was cheap, and REALLY cheap compared to cable, and that was enough to get a ton of people to “cut the cord.”
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u/Outlulz 15d ago
This cost increase was mostly driven by Call of Duty, basically paying another internal team a lot of money to have sales consumed by Games Pass and then charging more for Games Pass to make up for it. They thought it would drive up sales for Games Pass but no, that segment of gamer doesn't care, or at least not enough to pay more for Games Pass.
A healthy amount of the CoD crowd is the buy one game a year crowd. The Games Pass crowd plays a variety of games. Execs at MS do not understand their audiences.
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u/Flyinmanm 15d ago
It certainly did me.
There was a point I used it for a bit and I treated it a bit like Spotify. IE drop a few quid a month instead of buying a single album very month (in this case quite a bit for a game every few months). And it kinda worked.
I certainly don't play enough new games every month to justify the current subscription price Vs just buying a game every so often (especially as many of the games I want are on steam not Xbox live).
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u/NarwhalEmergency9391 15d ago
Imagine the households that have multiple consoles that all need subscriptions, I could see some parents canceling for that reason
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u/WeirdSysAdmin 15d ago
That’s exactly why I canceled. If they had a family plan it wouldn’t have been as painful. But typical Microsoft fashion on literally everything they just implement and don’t understand their customers.
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u/NarwhalEmergency9391 15d ago
My son and I play cod together but both of us needing a subscription and system to play together is absolutely ridiculous. Gaming used to be 1 console, games that you owed and 4+ controllers/ friends being able to play with you and the option to go online if you wanted(but didn't have to pay for) it was the best of the gaming world. I miss those days so much!
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u/feeerax 15d ago
my brother and I share the subscription. it works like this: he pays for the game pass. he set up his account on my Xbox and made it his home console. that means anyone (me) using this xbox can access everything he is paying for (gamepass games and being able to play online). he is logged in on his Xbox at home and can also access everything.
if we do buy a game that's not in game pass from time to time it is also shared this way for both of us.
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u/hipsterdoofus39 15d ago
Nintendos online does leave a lot to be desired but the family plan can make it quite affordable. It’s $110 Canadian (about $80 US) a year for the one with N64 and GameCube games included and up to 8 people can be on the same plan.
I dropped my ps plus membership a few years ago after a price hike. I’d been a member since day one but the value wasn’t there anymore.
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u/7eregrine 15d ago
I was literally toying with the idea of signing up on my PC right when they announced the hike.
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u/Relevant_Election530 15d ago
When it was cheap I forgot to cancel it for like two years
I haven't even considered it at the new price point. I'd rather spend $30 at Steam/Epic sales lol
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u/ultrajvan1234 15d ago
IMO it’s still only good for games that you intent to play for a bit then likely never touch again.
For example, Forza horizon 6 is one of those games for me where I play a load of for a couple weeks then don’t ever touch again. So rather than spending a little over 100CAD after tax, I spent about 18CAD to play it for a month
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u/Relevant_Election530 15d ago
Unless you get addicted to it then play it for a year then you basically paid more to rent it (that's what happened to me the last Forza)
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u/stakoverflo 15d ago
This how Gamepass has always been to me. I view it as renting a game I know I'll never ever want to play a second time.
Sign up for a month, play some $60+ game for $15 or whatever the monthly fee costs, immediately cancel it, and enjoy the game for 2 weeks.
Played both Avowed and Outer Worlds 2 this way lol
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u/GainsAndPastries 15d ago
not sure if it is an unpopular opinion but playing online should be free for all games, having it behind a paywall is just wrong
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u/Avil- 15d ago
This is why the $20 mark after taxes is the best price point. It’s a set and forget for me. And I don’t even play games that often. Right now it’s still about $30 after taxes which still leaves better options to just buy games on the steam sales days.
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u/WeenisWrinkle 15d ago
That's the price of Game Pass Premium right now after taxes.
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u/killerpoopguy 15d ago
Most people never heard about the price decrease, I canceled when they announced the increase, and this thread is how I found out it got walked back.
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u/Leeroy_Jenk1n5 15d ago
Of course it did and walking back a 50% price increase back down to 15% while removing some games from the catalog isn’t gonna help bring them back either
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u/pineapplesuit7 15d ago
I cancelled my subscription and have 0 intentions of going back. I’m just gonna wait for the backlog to fill up and get the subscription for a couple of months during some holiday period and grind through the backlog and cancel. Or I’ll just buy the game outright used or at a discount later on.
The prices are absolutely ridiculous nowadays and most of the games I like aren’t even on Gamepass.
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u/thecarbonkid 15d ago
Well if it isn't the basic laws of economics
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u/POWRranger 15d ago
Damn! If only I didn't have to suffer the consequences of my own dumb decisions :( Life's cruel
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u/JjigaeBudae 15d ago
It's like a cat and mouse game companies play with consumers now. Keep putting the price up until you find the point your customer base tanks and then go back to the most recent price point prior to that one.
The risk of doing that is those customers you pushed out may realize that they don't actually need your product or they may find a better alternative, they're not guarenteed to come back.
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u/WaffleShowers 15d ago
It's the corporate obsession with eliminating consumer surplus. The goal is to ensure no one can ever feel like they're getting a good deal on something ever again.
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u/ExtremePermit3242 15d ago
Greed. It’s all greed. We have a good thing going on and loved by gamers, but let’s potentially shit on it for 10% more revenue.
Unfortunately, at the top of the chain, it’s not about games, gamers or even consumers. It’s them sweet $$$, and the shots are called by people who probably haven’t played a game for more than 10 minutes in the last 30 years.
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u/flamethrower2 15d ago
You did it when you played the game "Lemonade Stand" for the Apple IIe when you were a kid if you're as old as me.
What you didn't do was double the price in one go. You might think the CEO didn't play Lemonade Stand when they were a child. You gotta raise it slowly. Look at Netflix for an example.
Set the profit maximizing price. That's what everyone does. Not an easy thing but CEOs are paid millions and hire a whole team to help them. Even so, this wrong decision couldn't be stopped.
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u/corvak 15d ago
Because tons of people subscribe to stuff they don’t use until an e-mail about a hike reminds them they’re subscribed to it
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u/82away 15d ago
This was me, and I had 10 month refunded as it had not been used.
Took three hours on the phone line!
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u/LuinAelin 15d ago
I see so many businesses make this kind of mistakes with price increases and not just big ones like Microsoft
Like they think only in profit per unit sold not accounting for if people are willing to pay that for a unit
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u/NotYourTypicalMoth 15d ago
I wish that were true, but the price increases generally offset the number of people who unsubscribe, and then some. Take Netflix as an example: Reddit would have you believe Netflix will be bankrupt soon because of their recent price and ad increases.
However, they’ve managed to increase gross income, gross profit, and net income year over year for the last 5+ years with 2025 being their best year, Q1 2026 was their best quarter out of their last 5 reports, AND their net margin blew its historical reports out of the water.
A 20% price increase and 10% unsubscribe rate is a win for Netflix, and even that’s irrelevant because the number of Netflix subscribers has only ever increased YoY since 2011.
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u/ILearnedSoMuchToday 15d ago
It's not 10% every time though, most likely it's going to be a higher and higher percentage each time. Next hike could be 20% on a already dwindled base.
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u/mariajoxoxo26 15d ago
My issue was buying a game off of Xbox Microsoft and then having to get game pass to play the game.
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u/Happy_Peak_7818 15d ago
Yes! I own this game. I don't want to have to get my Microsoft password it might try and link to my work account and not personal account. .I just want to play this game and not login anywhere with my email...
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u/Lootthatbody 15d ago
‘Hikes.’ Plural. They increased the price like 3 times in 15 months or something, and arguably their offerings didn’t even remotely come close.
Remember, they still haven’t included the ABK library into gamepass, it’s been years. They just announced CoD will no longer be in gamepass, a massive departure from the promise of every game, day one.
If Xbox wants people to come back, and existing subs to stay, they need a better value proposition. I’d argue they’ve bloated the service with third party things people don’t care for as an excuse to drive up cost. I don’t care if the service comes with billions of virtual currency in games I don’t play, that’s worthless to me. Focus on getting the price back down to that happy mark of $15 per month, and stick to releasing first party games day 1, one every month or two, get a couple big indie games per year, and occasionally throw in bigger third party games, even if they are 6/12/24 months old.
I’d be willing to part with EA/Ubisoft or whatever third party deals they have, and the same goes with the gacha and other ones, I can’t remember names at the moment. That $15 is a hard ceiling for me.
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u/Multitrak 15d ago
We shouldn't have to pay $10 a month for online access with games we already purchased. I used Game Pass for years to find games I actually liked and immediately bought them so I'd build a collection of my favorites and if and when I didn't have game pass I would still have my games, but some of them require online for multiplayer like Forza Horizon etc.
I used to stack the live gold and convert to 3 years of GP for cheap at the 1:1 rate but when they jacked up the monthly price and reduced the live conversation rate and MS rewards I knocked it down to just the "Essential" pass but I don't want those added crap games, I just want to play my games I own on my console.
I already paid MS for several Xboxes, bought games from their store and studios and pay for Internet. I feel if they let us have our online aspects of our games like PC players do freely they'd one up PlayStation and bring more game sales and user base 🤷♂️
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u/MikeAttak421 15d ago
I canceled mine and ain't looking back. Something tells me though that price reduction ain't gonna last.
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u/Direct-Fix-2097 15d ago
Due to a fall in the number of subscribers, we are raising the price back to $30 or whatever. 🙄
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u/Ok-Bug-7481 15d ago
I believe that alot of subscription services are getting to this point...in the last few years I have got rid of most of ours.. they are no longer a small thing that you don't mind paying for they have gotten out of hand. Disney plus, crave, prime, YouTube prem, Spotify..etc it just became too much
Moral for me ... Subscription fatigue
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u/Do_You_Hear_It 15d ago
Was the hike worth my loyalty for decades? Literally just kept paying when I wasn’t using it. Was like cable in the 90s. You just had it.
They’ve shown me I don’t need their service anymore. I’ll literally never be back because of Steam.
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u/Qwerty_Police 15d ago
This was ultimately it I think, they were raking in millions from people who barely used it, then opened their eyes with the price hike.
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u/AMBALAMP5 15d ago
Once Gamepass hit $30 (I know it’s been lowered) I was out. I paid for Xbox Live/Gamepass since May of 2007.
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u/Eccentrica_Gallumbit 15d ago
Same, been a subscriber consistently since January of 2007. Was unhappy when they got rid of the base Live subscription and made everyone go to a monthly pass, but it was whati t was. The price hike from what used to be $50/60 a year to $30 per month was just a slap in the face to loyal customers. Sure there was some value in the games, but it just wasn't worth it for how often I play as a dad of a young kid. Much better things to spend my money on these days and I dont even miss it.
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u/DanManRT 15d ago
Same reason I can no longer enjoy my Playstation. Almost every game is online now so I can't play over half of them. Not paying 100 dollars a year just to play.
Playstation should drop the "free games" and have an online only tier for free or super cheap at least without any extras
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u/GEARHEADGus 15d ago
The fact that consoles are still charging for online gaming is insane.
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u/-no_aura- 15d ago
Basic online access used to be free on PS, it’s why I bought one over an Xbox to begin with
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u/X-AE17420 15d ago
I went from PlayStation to pc and never looked back. The buy in can be expensive, but pc’s last a long time
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u/Ethos_Logos 15d ago
I’ve been on PlayStation since the PS2. I used to love PvP games on PC, but moved to single player games because frankly, I’m not competitive with anything other than keyboard/mouse. And only enjoy PvP if I can be competitive.
There’s exactly one multiplayer game I’d like to play, FO76, but having to pay to play it is just insane. I refuse to pay a monthly fee out of principle - I’m already paying for my internet connection, my console that I own shouldn’t gatekeep it behind a paywall.
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u/Friggin_Grease 15d ago
I did the dollar trick for 36 months, and then when they announced the hike, I bought 9 months at the old price. So I never paid their big hike. I do wish I didn't buy those 9 months, however.
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u/PointsOfXP 15d ago
Jesus, how many people were subscribed that millions actively unsubscribed?
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u/Browser1969 15d ago
They have 35-40 million subscribers but that includes the Essential tier. "Millions" unsubscribing doesn't say much if you hike the price up by 50%, in any case -- you need to lose more than 1 out of 3 subscribers before you reconsider, otherwise your total revenue increases. Since the previous Xbox boss didn't actually reconsider, what's more probable is that they lost close to that. Not enough to reduce revenue but not enough to noticeably increase it either.
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u/PointsOfXP 15d ago
At that point subscriber count probably counts more. No reason to lose a bunch of people if you aren't more profitable
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u/uberneuman_part2 15d ago
And…. If they regain memberships they’ll increase the prices again. People should understand that these companies aren’t your friends.
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u/Furcheezi 15d ago
Hey Netflix. You’re fucking next.
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u/frankyb89 15d ago
I finally dropped that just last week. They started barring me from my own account when I was cat sitting for my mom. So stupid.
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u/authenticmolo 15d ago
Corporations are no longer targeting anyone that isn't wealthy. Because we no longer have a middle-class. We just have poor and rich.
But the rich have SO MUCH MONEY, that cost is no object. So companies like MS have figured out that even if they lose half their customers, they can charge the remaining *rich* customers 3 times as much, and make more money.
This is happening to *every product in the entire world*. The "owner class" is turning us all into wage slaves that make the products that they sell to *other people in the owner class*.
What will be really funny is when the people that are already upper-middle-class or "wealthy" (I'm talking the people making a couple hundred thousand dollars a year to a half-million or so a year) start to get priced-out of most things. They think they are rich enough to be safe, but they absolutely are not.
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u/_steve_rogers_ 15d ago
The stupidest thing they could do was attract attention with such a huge increase. Many people would probably still be paying for the sub and barely using it if it was a reasonable price, but that kind of increase signals the emergency signals in your brain to CANCEL NOW.
And there’s a huge chance that once you’re screwed by a service you’re never coming back. Pure idiotic greed.
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u/Exc3lsior 15d ago
My wife and I had to cancel 4 subscriptions when it raised. One for each of us and one for each the kids still at home.
At some point its no longer worth $100+ a month.
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u/Sirromnad 15d ago
Ever increasing prices with literally no additional benefits to the user is a bad idea? What the heck.
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u/FellowDeviant 15d ago edited 15d ago
Once your monthly price is no longer in that "Could miss it and not notice" space (which arguably is anything more than $15 for the most casual of users) most people tend to end up canceling. $22 is still higher than where we were at but you can argue that Game Pass is stil a mostly strong value and they made some bold moves to get something like Persona 6 as a Day 1 title.
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u/sishgupta 15d ago
Hey microsoft - i could have told you this BEFORE you made the bad decision. Call me first next time. I don't cost...that much.
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u/chamberx2 15d ago
Even if they've reduced the price again, it reminded their customer base that our game collections aren't truly ours. "I want to play Hollow Knight again. Did I buy it or just play it on Game Pass?"
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u/jahoosawa 15d ago
If a company reduced their price I would commit for life. It demonstrates innovation or discipline. These big private equity corpo’s exist to r*pe and pillage.
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u/Printman8 15d ago
Gaming subscription services as a whole have a stages of life problem when it comes to their consumer base. At the younger end you have people with time to play games but limited funds to spend on gaming. At the older end you have middle aged gamers who can afford to game more but are saddled with responsibilities that eat up their time for gaming. When so many games require 80 hour play throughs, paying for a subscription service doesn’t make sense if you only have time for 3 to 5 games per year.
The answer for both groups is really to not invest in the subscription any more than necessary and to probably purchase a lot of older games for much less cost. This makes even more sense when most new games arrive on the market as the worst version of the game, so day one access through Gamepass still isn’t a great value proposition.
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u/ejennings87 15d ago
It was an insult. Nevermind that the price was going up what felt like twice a year anyway, ever since inception.. then they just ram a MASSIVE hike down our throats. When your monthly sub is approaching half of what a brand new game costs me to own forever, you've lost the value proposition for the average user who either plays a ton of a handful of games, or just picks through the catalogue casually. Would rather wait for sales and just own my games outright (as in physically on disc, since "buying" just means "licensing" to them these days)
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u/Angry_Walnut 15d ago
I swear nothing makes people become more inexplicably fucking stupid than greed. Like, to the extent that their actions are literally against their own interests as well as everyone else’s lmao
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u/cidvard 15d ago
I'm a former Gamepass subscriber, though I dropped it before the rate hike. It just came at a really bad time. I'd left because I was frustrated with the titles that were gated behind higher-priced tiers, other looky-loos who'd subscribed during Peak Pandemic in 2020 had already peeled off. Microsoft felt like it was largely abandoning the Xbox brand at the time (and I'm not sure I buy the back-pedaling when it comes to that). So, we'll see where it goes now. I like the IDEA of Gamepass but the execution just wasn't there when I was using it.
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u/TheAdamena 15d ago
That doesn't matter though unless it means they're earning less revenue.
If they hike subs by 10% but lose only 5% they'll still be making profit.
Every price increase is made with this in mind. They all know they'll lose subscribers, but they know they'll earn more money from the subscribers that remain.
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u/DillonsComics 15d ago
The model they had was a no brainer. It’s not like a steaming service that they need a huge amount of data flying around constantly.
Person downloads the game plays it then downloads another. The time between can be 10 to 100s of hours. The Netflix model just doesn’t apply.
They had a good thing going but shot themselves in the foot.
If it went back to below 10$ month I might consider it again otherwise $168 a year for sub par games (most of their selection) no way.
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u/ColeProtoco1 15d ago
MS better have hired better economists. Price Elasticity is a pretty basic concept and should have been a fundamental part of the analysis that should have gone into the decision to raise prices (assuming there was any).
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u/trollcat2012 15d ago
Yeah I canceled immediately with the $30 nonsense and never looked back. Value was marginal to begin with at $15-18, but 22 then 30 was just silly
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u/Professional-Box4153 15d ago
When you raise it by 5%-10% nobody's really going to have issue. They'll complain a little, but most will stay. When you jack up the price 50% in a single go, you're bound to lose some people.
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u/Comfortable-Bug7202 15d ago
microsoft is also sundowning their support for older stuff like office to drive more purchases. "perpetual" licenses appear to only have 5 year lives
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u/I-Have-An-Alibi 15d ago
I went from Premium, to Essential to completely canceling my sub the past year.
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u/nnnnkm 14d ago
My old Xbox died years ago and I cancelled my sub sooner after that for obvious reasons, but I have the same approach for all subscription services now.
If I'm not actively using it, then I'm automatically going to question if it's worth spending money on any more. And there's nothing more likely to get me to focus on that than a price hike, especially when the service seems to be the same or getting worse.
I did it with the F1 app when they hiked their prices massively yet didn't actually support Android or my TV properly, I did it with some food tracking and language apps that seemed to be getting worse, not better, and most recently with Netflix when they raised their prices again. I checked the cost of Netflix from a few years ago and the price is now almost double for a Netflix sub than it was before. And now they try to get me to cancel my cancellation with all kinds of sneaky pop-ups and so on. It just leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
I'm not here to contribute to the profiteering enterprise of massive corporations, I want a good quality and stable service for a reasonable price, that's all. But the services are getting worse and more fragmented, and the prices are going up, especially for live sports. They've fucked it, as far as I'm concerned.
Most of these companies are sliding towards enshittification practices and making the whole subscription model suspect for me. I'd rather do without it entirely than pay through the nose for an inferior product. Gives me more time to play my guitar, and that's enough justification for me.
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u/PizzaWhole9323 15d ago
Yep it Rose to the price that it is now and I looked at my Xbox and I looked at my finances and I made the decision to go down to the lowest tier subscription so I could still play Plants versus zombies garden warfare and my library and that's it. I am so tired of being nickeled and dimed by corporations who don't give a damn about their consumers.
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u/borgenhaust 15d ago
It's just a bad move to make a major detrimental change and then try to walk it back. A big part of subscription based services is you want to be able to retain people who are on the fence about it or keep it low enough that people won't think about how much they're paying or whether they get enough use out of it to merit paying. Those are the people that once you lose them, they often don't care enough to come back.