156
Xbox lost 'millions' of Game Pass subscribers after last year's massive price hike
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this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2026
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My theory is 'culling'.
They wanna find the diehards, refocus around them.
Minimizing costs and maximizing returns is the literal specialty of the new head of Xbox. Data Analyst wonk, excelled at figuring how to max the profitability of online store fronts.
She has literally 0 experience with video games, which is good in the sense that she's a pair of fresh eyes, but is bad in the sense that she has no real motivation or predisposition toward keeping anything old around just because it is the way things have been done.
Expect more, or at least more clever dark patterns.
MSFT is losing a fuck ton of money on all their AI investments, CoPilot being the biggest fuckup yet in their history, and their coziness with the US/NSA is basically losing them enterprise grade stuff in Europe.
They need to counterbalance this by turning other segments of their business into as profit-y profit centers as possible.
I still think medium term, they're gonna end up as basically mostly a library of giant, big name IPs, that you most easily will be able to access through some kind of MSFT ... Netflix but for Video Games, type of thing.
Its possible they keep making hardware beyond this last shot at a next gen ... some kind of hardware.
But if the whole thing isn't profitable enough to offset their losses everywhere else, I think they just drop down to minimal possible costs, and basically just become an IP dragon/gatekeeper.