It's honestly cheaper to just buy games than pay this subscription per year.

Plus, you get to keep the games.

Honestly, I've kinda gone back to buying physical media.

I bought DK Bananza on cart, and guess what? After I finished it, I gave it to my brother. Imagine that! Sharing a game you own? Madness.

I'm eager to pick up Ghost of Yotei from the store this afternoon, as well.

Knowing Microsoft, I'd like to thing that it went down like this:

Pardon me, your department isn't achieving the expected 20% annual revenue increase.

But we're just selling subscriptions to games that cost us nearly nothing. It's free money.

And you need to make more money from it, increase your subscriber count or your costs, or we'll cut your staff.

I work in the IT software licensing industry, it's a fucking cancer I can't wait to fail so bad that when we have the first extended internet outage failure so bad that it shows the world that subscriptions are a liability that shouldn't exist

I haven't subbed to gamepads for years because I knew this would eventually happen. Gamepass was designed to get people used to not purchasing games and instead letting them come to them. Subscribers now have to chose between paying even more each month or losing access to the library of games available to them.

Pro financial tip: Be a patient gamer. Get the games you are interested in during sales. Fuck FOMO, subscription models and pre-orders.

Buying isn't owning, but it has to be better than this...

Never would I ever subscribe to a game service. That's just me.

I just bought 12 month of Ultimate on eBay. I always did this in the past, because it's cheaper than buying directly from Microsoft. So far, I made good experience with it.

The way it usually works is, that you get a few codes you need to redeem. I got three codes for 36 month of EA Play and then one code for Ultimate that is supposed to transform the EA Play subscription to 12 month Ultimate. But due to the the price hike, the subscription transformation changed as well and I did not get the 12 month.

I'm now in contact with the seller and he tries to find a solution. I want to have my 12 month Ultimate that he offered for the price. But it also sucks for the seller. Seems like we both didn't know. He basically sold it to cheap. I paid 150€ for 12 month Ultimate and he just now increased the price to 200€.

The new prices are insane! 150€ a year is already my upper limit. I'm not gonna pay 200€ or even more a year. I think, if my new subscription is over, I will not extend it. I like the idea of Game Pass, but that's to much money.

The thing is I really like Game Consoles. I want to play in front of my TV. I wish, Steam would make another Steam Machine with Steam OS. I do want an all in one solution. The last thing I want is a gaming PC. I hope, alternatives to Xbox Consoles and Playstation come up.

I know, I could also use the XBox without GamePass, but I do play online something and it would be nice to get away from subscriptions completly.

You know, fundamentally, I don't hate Gamepass as a concept. "Netflix, but for videogames" is an idea I can get behind, as it widens the audience for something I love by lowering the bar of entry. There are plenty of people out there that benefit from being able to play a few games here and there without needing to commit hundreds of hours to $100 purchases.

But Netflix has overstepped with price hikes and ads, and I've cancelled my service with them. That Microsoft thinks it can charge some ~$40CAD a month is pure hubris. I hope they learn quickly that, at that price point, the enthusiast market will happily cancel and just buy their games outright, and the casual market will decide it's an expense they don't need.

Just cancelled mine. I have barely been doing ~2 games per year, and the cost was low enough for me to not really care about the months I didn't play at all.

But a price increase is the straw.

I'm usually fine with paying more for things I enjoy that are worth it. Like $70 games are just not a big deal to me.

I'm also too lazy to cancel most things. I've ignored Game Pass price hikes before and justified them by thinking of all the games I played without buying.

But this one is just ridiculous. There's no value here, no way for me to justify it. I was enjoying Silksong on Xbox because I didn't have to buy it, but now that I do have to buy it I guess I'll do that on my Switch instead. Replaying it is going to be rough, especially without my Elite controller.

I hope Microsoft gets their shit together, because Xbox has been my favorite game platform for years.

The thing about this shit is...

Microsoft, like Google, is now a user-data driven company and they have already made loss/profit ratio analysis on this long before they released the price increase. They're absolutely banking on people cancelling but making up the difference and then some from the people who stay.

For a thought experiment let's consider how many subscribers they were reported to have in Feburary: 34 million. Let's assume that everyone is paying for the highest tier to make the math easier. So current income would be 34 million user x $20 a month and thats $680 million a month. New income of 34 million users x $30 a month is $1.02 billion. The difference is $340 million a month. Let's divide that by $30 a month. That gets us about 11,333,333 users. So they can hemorrhage over 11 million users and still break even. To make sure, let's subtract 11 million users. That gives us 23 million users. 23 million users x $30 a month is $690 million a month, a cool $10 million a month above current profits.

For final context, 11 million users is roughly 32% of their entire subscriber count. They can afford to lose a third of the people subscribing and still make money.

The math doesn't bode well for us who vote with our wallets.