SalShortly After Xbox Game Pass Prices Spiked, the Page to Cancel Game Pass Subscriptions Was Overwhelmed
wetbeardhairsNow is probably not the best time to sell my xbox… I bet the market is flooding
jordanlundYou might even be able to sell it for what you paid for it…
Tollana1234567if costco stop selling xbox(a series) its a bad sign.
Internet is being shitty on link. What is the price increasing to/from? When was the last increase?
It varies by location. But for me on brazil at least every single subscription doubled in price. PC Game Pass was 36 BRL, it is now 70. Ultimate was 60 BRL, now it’s 120. I cannot justify this shit.
This link has a pretty good comparison between the new and old gamepass features/prices. The cheapest tier is actually better than it used to be, but it looks like the more expensive ones are getting bundled with shit most people won’t want just so they can justify increasing the price.
There are four tiers to the gamepass: Core, Standard, PC, and Ultimate. The first two were exclusive to Xbox, the PC version was obviously exclusive to PCs, and Ultimate was available for both. All tiers aside from the PC gamepass are now being bundled with xbox’s cloud gaming, with higher tiers having shorter wait times and better quality.
This is all US pricing, so take it with a grain of salt considering the other user said their prices doubled:
Dr. WeskerEA also further buried the ability to cancel EA accounts, after the announcement they had been sold to the Saudis and Kushner.
other_catBetween that, this, and Disney+ cancellation page “accidentally” going down during that fiasco, this is exactly why I’ve switched to using only virtual cards for subscriptions. Pause/Cancel the virtual card, voila, no more subscription.
Good thing I never signed up for one.
Any Steam game that requires an EA, Ubisoft, Blizzard, whatever account is a total non-starter for me. I’ve looked at some of the newer Battlefields when they’re on sale for like $2 and I still can’t be convinced. Likely never will.
Ok with me, there’s lots of other publishers out there, both independents and studios, that I’d much rather give my $2 to.
To be fair, those kinds of changes do not usually happen so rapidly after a purchase, and was likely already planned for implementation and started before the sale.
In other words, it is likely EA was already planning to make that change regardless of if the sale went through or not.
they dont want SA or kushner to hold an EMPTY bag, but i suspect they will get alot of cancellations in the future. wish they seperate westwood so a proper CNC can be revived.
And Kyrandia!
I Cast FistWestwood, my beloved 😢
Would be good if Maxis also got out of their throes, though that’s extremely unlikely, given The Sims
The price increase is absurd. I cancelled too, because while I do play quite a bit, this level of corporate greed is completely unjustifiable to me. If rather watch playthroughs of new games on Twitch or YouTube and then buy them a year later on sale than pay this bloody much, eff that.
Just so you know, they only thought you were stupid enough to pay more because you were stupid to enough to pay at all.
Use your brain before your wallet. Start torrenting.
To be fair it‘s as absurd as it was inevitable. Gamepass was always meant as this temporary thing you can try out to play some new games until everyone jumps ship because of increased prices. It has been preached for years.
M137Why watch playthroughs at all? Just wait till the games are on sale. And only a year isn’t that long, wait more and get better deals with more complete games. There’s nothing saying you need to hurry in any way, and several things saying it’s a good idea to wait. There are more than enough games available for anyone to not have to constantly claw at the newest releases in any way.
Scotty_Trees“watch playthroughs of new games on Twitch of YouTube”
welcome to my life for the last couple of many years lol. Not that I’ve been boycotting per se, but I haven’t bought a new game in years cuz my laptop is over a decade old so the best I can play is minecraft, or just use my xbox one for battlefield 4. the corporate greed from the last decade has caused me to never buy this crap again. I love videogames so much, thank god for emulators.
I don’t need any trash EsaudiaA dishes out. People need to go play old/vintage games, get back to the roots, before games were nothing but meaningless cash grabs.
It’s nice they pulled this nonsense during a steam sale. Cancelled and picked up halo mcc and silksong.
silksong isn’t on sale.
Impulse purchase
A game, where depending on opinion, $20 is only $20.
It’s a pretty low price already, and I personally think the devs deserve it. Hope you enjoy!
samus12345Coming for the sale and leaving having bought a game not on sale is part of why sales exist!
It was nice to have Xbox a month or two a year to play new releases. Guess that it’s over now, no problem, still a patient gamer.
Snot FlickermanThe thing about this shit is…
Microsoft, like Google, is now a user-data driven company and they have already made loss/profit ratio analysis on this long before they released the price increase. They’re absolutely banking on people cancelling but making up the difference and then some from the people who stay.
For a thought experiment let’s consider how many subscribers they were reported to have in Feburary: 34 million. Let’s assume that everyone is paying for the highest tier to make the math easier. So current income would be 34 million user x $20 a month and thats $680 million a month. New income of 34 million users x $30 a month is $1.02 billion. The difference is $340 million a month. Let’s divide that by $30 a month. That gets us about 11,333,333 users. So they can hemorrhage over 11 million users and still break even. To make sure, let’s subtract 11 million users. That gives us 23 million users. 23 million users x $30 a month is $690 million a month, a cool $10 million a month above current profits.
For final context, 11 million users is roughly 32% of their entire subscriber count. They can afford to lose a third of the people subscribing and still make money.
The math doesn’t bode well for us who vote with our wallets.
One could imagine that conveniently, Microsoft’s online support pages and the amount of support staff were designed to only handle hundreds of thousands of cancelations at a time.
I’m not a certified math surgeon, but I think your math is wildly optimistic in favor of Microsoft due to how the subscriptions are actually brokendown per price tier.
I don’t doubt that they did a lot of math to figure out an acceptable level of churn for this change, I just don’t think it’s nearly as generous and wide as you’re calculating.
And it gets even better. Instead of up to 33% leaving, say 50% of that group convert to Premium instead of Ultimate. That isn’t any lost revenue since the price is going up to what Ultimate used to be. So that cushions their numbers even more.
Now factor in the cost savings from a lower server load and less staff to run the back end, and possibly the smaller licensing\use costs for the games available to play since less people would be accessing those games.
But also less new users and still the usual churn of existing users. It could be a downward spiral.
That’s the next CEOs problem.
Yes, but still something they will look at. It means when it becomes unviable with the squeeze already on, those that chose to pay the higher fees lose access to everything as they shut it down. I’m sure they will thank their loyal subscribers, so there is that.
My guess is they realise that xbox users in general is likely on a downward trajectory and now is the time to milk them.
Okay, but wouldn’t a higher price also discourage new people from subscribing in the first place? Or are companies that shortsighted?
Most of them are. Just make profit NOW!!
The same math is there too. They can afford to loose one third of new subscribers to get the same amount of money.
But their new customer acquisition cost wont get higher at the same pace and they get more valuable customers whose payback period will be shorter.
Also i dont think its relevant here, but less customers means less operating costs, so they will most likelly save some money on customer service and behind the scenes things like server upkeeps etc., but i dont think these make real difference here.
Also if for some reason things start to go bad they still have option to create “a budget version” for the people who see the normal subscrition as too expencive.
For years I’ve been warning whoever would listen that XboxGP, much like any other content subscription service owned by a public company would inevitably lead to a massive consumer squeeze. Fortunately it happened before MS managed to metastasise into a monopoly in gaming too. Good riddance.
SoftestSapphicGetting users to pay extra for features that should already be included with their overpriced consoles is such a scam.
Ffs xbox live used to be free -_-
It’s the Microsoft way. They hide security features that should be standard behind higher subscription tiers. It’s entirely bullshit.
It’s all a scam.
It’s been a scam since the first Xbox where they charged people to play online.
The thing is, once they see dumbasses are willing to be scammed, they see no reason to stop there.
The only winning move is not to pay.
Turned off my recurring billing. I’ll have about 3 months then it’s bye bye. I have been a customer since 360, but now will probably sign up for Playstation Network for the first time.
Ehh… PSN isn’t really any better. Their Game Pass competitor is a hot mess. Better to just buy games outright, especially during sales.
Better to use your brain and torrent instead of being a useful idiot paying for corporate campuses.
I know it’s not better, but it has a bunch of the catalog from Game Pass as well as a bunch of PS titles I’ve missed while being on Xbox.
That’s a good callout - treating these game rental services more like we do with streaming video services by subbing to one for just a few months, then dropping it for another.
Yeah I was shocked at the overlap of titles between the 2. If I had noticed that the last price hike, I might have switched sooner.
but now will probably sign up for Playstation Network for the first time.
Fucking hell… some people legitimately never learn.
They are destined to be suckers for life.
Oh I’m sorry, did Playstation start charging 30 bucks for their service? Oh, it’s actually CHEAPER than Xbox even was? Oh and it’s a massive back catalog of PS games I haven’t played due to being on Xbox? Fuck me right?
If you have a backlog of games that you have bought, why do you need an online subscription for them? Or am I misunderstanding something?
I don’t have a backlog of PS games due to mainly playing Xbox for the last 20 something years. That’s why subscription services can make sense, you play through games you’ve missed out on. Kind of like sub hopping for tv streaming, you build up a back log, sub for a few months then move to the next.
Aviandelight OMG wtf is this shit. Just out of nowhere with no notice. My husband was so fucking excited to see so many games added today and now I know why. Fuck that I am not paying $30 a month for this shit.
Jfc I just downgraded back to Premium. We were paying for Ultimate but never used it. What a great way to force users to look at their subbed to. It’s pretty fucking awful to pull this shit with no real announcement.
sp3ctr4l… and here is yet another opportunity I have in the past 6ish months to post the same comment:
People still use Microsoft products?!
nullNope. Nobody uses them.
I literally cannot imagine why they would, and I used to work for them.
Hardly anyone does
Your comment really just shout “i’m living under a rock!”
Yep, me with my years of working for MSFT, playing their games, configuring their software and using it at large businesses… and then realizing its all fucking garbage from first hand experience, and then replacing it all with open sourcr shit both at home and at work…
Yep, I really am sound like live under rock.
Nobody care about your credentials though, your “people still use microsoft product” comment is the one that sounds like you’re living under a rock.
I think he’s just not an idiot like most of the people who are finally cancelling their subscriptions.
I know, it’s rare to find someone who isn’t eager to be ripped off.