It was never sustainable, they threw in tons of money to disrupt the market and get subscribers share, and now that they have done that as much as they can, they are trying to get the money.
The most baffling thing is not the price hike - it’s the price hike combined Xbox Game Studios release roadmap looking barren compared to the last 2 years. What is this $30 supposed to pay for? Severance packages?
This is just the zeitgeist of 21st century capitalism.
✓ Subscriptions. Make them pay you forever.
✓ Low initial price to saturate market share and stifle competition while you operate at a loss.
✓ Drive all realistic competitors out of the market (stadia et al.)
✓ Slow user growth? Jack up prices!
I’m not surprised they got out of the hardware business. Software license protection publishing fees are way more lucrative than hardware sales. The hardware is just there to lock people into the software.
And before that, a lot of people were taking advantage of the Xbox Live Gold conversion deal, where folks were getting access to GamePass Ultimate for $60/year.
I once spent $180 for 3 years of GamePass, and now that same amount only gets you 6 months.
It was great at 15 because at that point 180 a year you could be sure to play 3 AAA games worth in a year. Doubling that is pretty ehhhh. You need to cycle through a ton of games to get your money worth there.
No better than PS+ Extra catalog. For streaming they’re worse than PS plus cloud, Amazon Luna, and GeForce Now. Gamepass exists for Xbox studio games that aren’t very popular
Xbox Studio Games are responsible for most of the current top 10 best selling games on PlayStation. They don’t have that much interesting stuff in the pipeline though.
Circana Research data for 2025Q2. It’d be hard to get to the top of all-time sales given that Microsoft started releasing their stuff on PlayStation very recently.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: [email protected]
Video game news oriented community. No NanoUFO is not a bot :)
Posts.
News oriented content (general reviews, previews or retrospectives allowed).
Broad discussion posts (preferably not only about a specific game).
No humor/memes etc…
No affiliate links
No advertising.
No clickbait, editorialized, sensational titles. State the game in question in the title. No all caps.
No self promotion.
No duplicate posts, newer post will be deleted unless there is more discussion in one of the posts.
No politics.
Comments.
No personal attacks.
Obey instance rules.
No low effort comments(one or two words, emoji etc…)
Please use spoiler tags for spoilers.
My goal is just to have a community where people can go and see what new game news is out for the day and comment on it.
Don’t forget to pirate games and just pay your favorite studios directly
It was never sustainable, they threw in tons of money to disrupt the market and get subscribers share, and now that they have done that as much as they can, they are trying to get the money.
Great. Even less incentive to get into the Microsoft ecosystem.
It was the only incentive for most people.
The most baffling thing is not the price hike - it’s the price hike combined Xbox Game Studios release roadmap looking barren compared to the last 2 years. What is this $30 supposed to pay for? Severance packages?
Most of the games I play on it are $5… I’ll probably stop now too
This is just the zeitgeist of 21st century capitalism.
✓ Subscriptions. Make them pay you forever.
✓ Low initial price to saturate market share and stifle competition while you operate at a loss.
✓ Drive all realistic competitors out of the market (stadia et al.)
✓ Slow user growth? Jack up prices!
I’m not surprised they got out of the hardware business. Software license
protectionpublishing fees are way more lucrative than hardware sales. The hardware is just there to lock people into the software.Holy shit, wasn’t it like ten bucks before?
Ultimate was $20. Still an enormous price hike.
It was $15/mo before it’s first price hike, too.
And before that, a lot of people were taking advantage of the Xbox Live Gold conversion deal, where folks were getting access to GamePass Ultimate for $60/year.
I once spent $180 for 3 years of GamePass, and now that same amount only gets you 6 months.
It was like 15 -> 20 and now to 30.
It was great at 15 because at that point 180 a year you could be sure to play 3 AAA games worth in a year. Doubling that is pretty ehhhh. You need to cycle through a ton of games to get your money worth there.
Hell I remember when it FIRST came out and it was like $1.
No thanks. It’s been a great 3 years though but £22.99 a month is too hard to justify.
The price hikes will continue.
Tale as old as time.
MS is on drugs. Full lunacy.
🏴☠️
No better than PS+ Extra catalog. For streaming they’re worse than PS plus cloud, Amazon Luna, and GeForce Now. Gamepass exists for Xbox studio games that aren’t very popular
Xbox Studio Games are responsible for most of the current top 10 best selling games on PlayStation. They don’t have that much interesting stuff in the pipeline though.
You have a source for that claim? This says otherwise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_PlayStation_5_video_games
Circana Research data for 2025Q2. It’d be hard to get to the top of all-time sales given that Microsoft started releasing their stuff on PlayStation very recently.