Xbox Game Pass Price DECREASE

Xbox Just Cut Game Pass Prices. Here's What You Need to Know

This one has been a long time coming.

Microsoft announced today that Game Pass Ultimate is dropping from $29.99 a month down to $22.99, effective immediately. PC Game Pass is also coming down, from $16.49 to $13.99 a month. That's nearly a 25% cut on Ultimate, which not long ago saw a $10 price hike that did not go over well with pretty much anyone.

The move comes directly from Asha Sharma, the new head of Xbox Gaming who stepped in after Phil Spencer's departure earlier this year. Sharma had already signaled this was coming in a leaked internal memo, telling employees that Game Pass had simply become too expensive and that the service needed a better value equation. As a result many players began to wonder if this leak would become reality. Today, that memo became action.

There Is a Catch

It wouldn't be a Microsoft announcement without a footnote, and this one is a fairly significant one. Going forward, Call of Duty titles will no longer be joining Game Pass Ultimate or PC Game Pass at launch. If you want the new Call of Duty on day one, you're buying it outright at $69.99. The older titles already in the service will stay put, but new entries in the franchise are out of the day one picture for subscribers.

How you feel about that trade-off probably depends on how much you care about Call of Duty. If you're someone who was essentially paying the Ultimate premium specifically for those day one drops, this restructuring may not feel like a win. But if you were on the fence about the price hike and never really touched Call of Duty anyway, this is a pretty straightforward improvement. Many players have been outspoken online about the lack of value they felt COD added to the service and it seems Xbox has listened.

Why This Matters

Revenue from Xbox content and services had been coming in below internal projections, and the backlash to last year's price increases was loud and sustained. People left. People downgraded. The math wasn't working. So Sharma has acted quickly and emphatically in a move that is likely to gain some good will within the community. What comes next, we do not know.

Sharma's approach here seems to be about resetting the relationship with players rather than squeezing more out of the ones who stayed. Whether that translates into subscriber growth remains to be seen, but the direction is clearly more consumer friendly than what we've seen from Xbox over the past couple of years.

It's a good day to be a Game Pass subscriber. Just maybe not if your whole thing is Call of Duty.