It is not hard to get your money’s worth with Xbox Game Pass. I said that when it first launched at $5/month, and maintained that when it went up to $10/month ($15/month foﷺr Ultimate). Now it’s $11/month ($17/month) and it’s still the best deal in gaming. Game Pass added over 100 games so far this year, most of them brand new, and you only needed to play a small handful of them to make your subscription worthwhile.
It doesn’t seem like Game Pass is going to stop growing anytime soon, either. There’s already more t🐟han 40 games confirmed coming to the service next year, including 📖Fable, Hellblade 2, Stalker 2, Avowed, Ark 2, Citizen Sleeper 2, Hollow Knight 2, The Outer Worlds 2, and Still Wakes the Deep. This week, it will begin adding games, such as Modern Warfare 3 and Diablo 4, to Game Pass in the future.
It’s great to see Game Pass continue to increase in value, but I can’t be the only one waiting for the other shoe to drop. Microsoft’s unfettered spending to bolster Game Pass will eventually trickle down to subscribers just as it has with every other subscription streaming service. If the recent price hikes across almost every streamer areඣ any indication, Game Pass is going to eventually become prohibitively expensive.
Xbox Will "Exit The Gaming Business" If Game Pass Doesn't Get Enough Subscribers
"If we do not make more progress than this of🐎f console, we would exit the gaming business."
My household has been pretty cavalier about collecting streaming subscriptions, but with all the recent price increases we’ve had to make so frustrating decisions about what to keep and what cordless cord to cut. Hulu’s monthly fee just increased from $15 to $18, while Disney Plus jumped from $11 to $14. Amazon Prime’s annual price increased by $20 this year, while Max increased by $1 a month. Netflix, which increased to $15.50 last year, is reportedly going to increase again. Many of these services, including Netflix, Hulu, Discovery Plus, Paramount Plus (just increased by $2/month), and AMC Plus all offer an ad-supported tier for a lower monthly price. Even so, these subscriptions add up so quic🦹kly that it’s easy to spend more now than we ever did on cable television.
Game Pass isn’t in quite the same situation, but it is subject to many of the same forces. Competition among streaming ꦡservices has led to stagnation in subscriptions across the board, forcing each streamer to spend more to acquire fewer subscribers, and passing that cost off on the customers. Game Pass doesn't have much competition in the subscription video game business, at least not that, but it is spending billions of dollars, largely to add value to Game Pass. Call it the Pareto principle or the law of diminishing returns, either way the fact is that Micorosoft is going to have to continue spending more to earn fewer and fewer subscribers. Eventually, the only solution will be to keep raising the price of Game Pass.
There’s a point at which Game Pass will stop being viable, as traditional streaming services are (hopefully) starting to realize. It’s easy to calculate the price of a game versus the price of Game Pass, and the more the price increases the more people will realize they’re not getting value out of it. Microsoft can add as many incentives for 𝄹free Crunchyroll or Overwatch bucks as it wishes, but at the end of the day there’s a maximum people will be willing to pay to stay subscribed, and there’s only so many potential subscribers in the world. Everyone’s excited about playing Modern Warfare 3 for free now, but they won’t be excited about how expensive Game Pass gets if Microsoft keeps this up.
