But hey don’t kid yourself, it’s still too expensive
Today, disrupting my lunch plans, Microsoft revealed the big news that it was finally dropping the price of Game Pass Ultimate. Over the last year the company wrecked all of its remaining good will and raised the price to $29.99, alienating fans ands players alike.
It stunk! We all canceled!
New head of Xbox Asha Sharma stated that she and her team would evaluate everything in the brand to try and fix what ails them, and it appears that would be starting with the streaming service. Game Pass Ultimate, which includes basically everything under the Game Pass umbrella, is now down to $22.99/month. PC Game Pass has been adjusted from $16.49 to $13.99/month.
Before we celebrate, here’s the rub: In order to do so, Call of Duty new releases will no longer be on Game Pass Ultimate, instead arriving a year later. That big, giant Activision purchase that cost billions of dollars and thousands of jobs? It seems to be more of an albatross around the company’s neck than a savior. The new COD-less price roughly equates to $84 over the course of a year should someone stay subscribed, which is roughly around the price of modern COD games when they launch. Microsoft is basically saying that they now want us to pay for COD at full price instead of subscribing for a year.
And that $22.99 price? That’s still nto a winner. Prices are percieved in simplicity, and in the era of every streamer raising their price $23 is a weird one. I’m not saying $19.99/month is perfect, but it sure does fall below that $20 line and hits that weird part of our brain that almost considers it comfortable and passable. It’s doubly tough to swallow at that point because even though content on Netflix and other streamers cycles off we can usually find it somewhere else we’re subscribed — we can’t do that with Xbox. Games tend to leave Game Pass much faster than movies leave streamers, so we’re never sure if a game we’re enjoying is going to be around in a year when we want to pick it back up again.
Anyhoo, there are certainly some folks doing backflips to tell us how this is a great thing, but just, like, give me an Xbox-only tier. That’s all I want. And put it on Switch 2.
Source: Xbox
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