My son disagrees with my decision to leave after that price hike. But, I set aside the annual amount in an "envelope" for him to buy games outright on steam etc vs renting them on Gamepass

Good. Then reduce the price and remove the useless parts of it.

Interestingly, Apple made their One subscription pick&mix (you can choose to e.g. only have the iCloud expansion + Arcade in it, reducing the monthly cost), and it drove subscriber numbers up.

Microsoft could do the same. Offer the service at a fair price, allow users to choose what parts of a conjoined service stack they want, and you'll have users.

Force them to go all-or-nothing (which was what the restructuring of Game Pass led to), and jack up the prices 3-4x, and watch them go away by the millions.

/me patting myself on the back for avoiding subscriptions like the plague since the 90s.

Fuckin duh

It wasn't just the price increase, it's also that my fucking series x wasn't an upgrade in experience at all, (fuck off loading time bullshit).

To be fair, Gamepass had 34 million subscribers before the price hike, so as long as they drove away less than 11 million, Microsoft still comes out on top after their 50% hike while having to provide services to fewer accounts.

The fact that I need a game pass to play LAN games is what drove me away.

I was one of those people. Yes I still have some remaining time left on my Gamepass Ultimate subscription, but I purchased a mid-level gaming pc and a bunch of Steam games. It'll be cheaper in the long run for me.

I've pulled off the Xbox band-aid and even reverting the price hike won't persuade me to go back. I've been a continuous subscriber since mid-360 days.

I stopped using Gameapass when I got a Steam Deck

Microsoft doesn't want me to use their product so I won't.

Bad news Microsoft, I didn't just leave gamepass, I left windows.

One of the big issues MS, and many other, companies will have is that it doesn’t work out like the Goldilocks story.

“Okay. That price was too high. Let’s dial it back just a bit, and it’ll be juuust right. ……Why aren’t people coming back?”

People burned by high prices will find alternatives, and can very quickly settle with the transition issues of those alternatives. The same has been found on conveniences like potato chips.

Trust arrives on foot but leaves on horseback.

Good luck getting those millions of subscribers back again now that you showed your "we will fuck you any chance we get" cards.

The change saw Game Pass Ultimate jump 50%, rising from $19.99 to $29.99 per month. PC Game Pass also increased from $11.99 to $16.49, marking nearly a 40% hike.

What grossly incompetent leadership.

The only Microsoft service I was using was Game Pass. For me, it was never cheap... the price was fair for what they offered. But after they doubled it I cancelled immediately and never looked back. And I would not, even if they decided to drop the price back again to what it was. Because now I know it is unreliable, and they will raise the price again as soon as they feel comfortable.

Typical of MS though, so that didn't surprise me at all. They just can't keep a reliable and fair priced service for long. As soon as they believe they can fuck people up, they do.

But thankfully nowadays we have so many options, to whatever product Microsoft offers, that's actually not as hard to get free of them as they might think.

When they hiked the price, I dropped from Ultimate to the minimum required for online multiplayer. I imagine that each month I put the difference in my Steam Machine fund (or some custom built PC running SteamOS).

"Millions", just how many subscribers in total do they have?

The old price was too high for me. The raised one made me roll my eyes.

Yes! They actually heard me!

Usually I get pissed about these things and nobody cares.

Like thuy give a fuck, the real question is whether it improved profitability.

I left after the first price hike.

Most people do it as a hobby, something to de-stress. Microsoft just assumes everyone is a 10y old with rage issues and a love for Antebellum South Linguistics.

Yup.

It's competitive out there for hardcore gamers and Microsoft is losing. The ones who are buying on a massive scale are their demographic (obviously).

I personally kept gamepass through the price hikes because it's the only thing I pay for gaming wise. They don't make much off of me. I pay the monthly fee, play the free games, and occasionally buy a game that's like 80% off. I will buy games on day 1 but they are usually huge releases like GTA6 or Fable.... Games that come out once a generation or longer.

/me lives with zero subscriptions

feels good. never paid ms to play games I own either

Microsoft has done a really good job of driving customers away for years. I should know they drove me away years ago …

I'd buy a month for $10 once in a while if there are 2-3 games I'm interested in but don't want to commit to a full purchase for.

For $5/mo, I'd probably just subscribe and forget about it until they inevitably start hiking the price up again.

I never subbed even after using free trials because all of these subscription services follow the same capitalist shareholder corporate path, doesn't matter what it's for.

Initially cheap, good "value" and designed to be habit forming to retain their userbase. Operate at a loss. Then they jack the price up every year once they hit a magic number userbase goal and start cutting costs at the same time. Quality drops, price goes up.

I cancelled my whole Live sub, which had been uninterrupted since it was in beta.

I think they need to invent a new way of playing games on a subscription, like renting a game for 3 months for x dollars. I bet many players subscribe for one month and play the heck out of a new release then stop paying.

I mean, also around that time they doubled down on supporting Israel's genocide and, here in the US, mass surveilance by ICE. I know that's equally if not more important for me personally

I was one of them. What started as a "Gold" membership for $60/yr or $5/mo broken down, became "Game Pass"around 2017 and included Games With Gold for $10/mo. I want to say including PC was $15/mo.

Fast Forward, my now $20/mo subscription went up to $30/mo, and for that $360/year price, that could afford me 5-6 triple A titles if there are even that many I'd actually be interested in. I canceled at the end of my $20/mo period.

I don't play enough to make it worth it, Games with Gold are gone, and I rarely play online anymore to where I need to pay. Maybe CoD or Halo, but I think those are now free MP.

If MS wants my business again, quit fucking your previously loyal customers time and time again. Bring back the $5/mo gold only tier.

I feel like those hikes are only bc nobody else had alternatives to offer. PS just to massive price hikes, PC components went way up, so "to remain competitively priced" (aka gouge customers slightly less than the competition) they too increased prices..

Well fuck your stupid fucking subscription service. I'll go back to pirating games. Thankfully, I hoard old PC parts so I'll build my kids some solid rigs out of spare parts, setup a shared network folder for game installs, and boom, we all have access.

I did the math when this happened, they were absolutely banking on losing customers, but they misplayed their hand. They figured they would still be making money with the price increases even if they lost nearly third of their US gaming audience. By my back of the napkin numbers, as long as they lost less than 30%, they would be making more profit.

They must have lost more than they planned if they pulled a reversal or the price increase was a trial balloon to gauge response and whether people would come back for reduced prices.

These companies are of course happy to treat their customers like one big psychological experiment.

I canceled my subscription within a couple of days of the announcement and then sold my Series X.

I thought I was going to miss playing it, but I don't.