153
Xbox lost 'millions' of Game Pass subscribers after last year's massive price hike
(www.pcgamer.com)
Oh no... anyway.
this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2026
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I was already not getting enough value from it, the price change sealed the deal for me.
Same, I had been paying for it for years and barely using it. The price hike was the prime motivator for me to cancel.
I have a conspiracy theory here: They raised the price that high, knowing it is too high, just to lower it again. Why would they do it? To have an excuse to remove Call of Duty from Game Pass.
I think it's even simpler than that; to find out what the maximum people really will pay is. The price has gone down, but not to what it was before. There's still something like a 20% increase. If people go crawling back, MS has just figured out where the suckers are.
Yeah, that is also a strategy known to work: Increase 2 steps forward, "oh we hear you community", step back 1 time, profit while looking like the good guy.
"We listened."
No, you didn't you jackals, you had to back down
If one idiot falls for that, it's a profit for them
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.
Genuine question - why would they want to remove Call of Duty from game pass?
Microsoft owns the company that makes Call of Duty so in order to make more money they would want people to buy the game each year instead of just having game pass. The big hope being that someone both buys COD and subscribes to GamePass.
They already have, with the price decrease. It's official announced. Because selling Call of Duty is a huge deal and makes lot of money. The game is extremely expensive and they don't want to miss out on the revenue. Unlike any of their other games.
Eh, they might still be benefiting here.
If you double your prices and lose half your customers, you're still coming out ahead -- still making the same amount of money, while only needing to serve half as many customers, which lowers your expenses.
They raised the price 50%, not 100%. I’d agree with you if they didn’t quickly walk most of the hike back.
That's what Disney has done over the past couple of years. Clearly they've decided that they aren't the vacation for all Americans, it's the vacation for rich Americans. So they've cranked up the prices, knowing the rich will pay it without a word, and spend lots more on luxury hotels and restaurants, while the poors will stop taking up space.
Lays just had a price decrease because a couple of years ago, they decided to get really greedy, and crank up their prices. Really stupid, since you can buy a big bag of first rate chips from Aldi for less than $2.
They finally decreased their prices - AFTER losing a couple of billion bucks, the dickheads.
Prices LOWER when People leave? How WEIRD!
-People who COMPLAIN about Prices while CONTINUING to Pay those Prices!
selling at a higher price to fewer customers. they're probably still making more money.
As Geese Howard said, "Predictabo!"