Microsoft Is Crippling The Concept Of Xbox Game Pass With New Day One Launch Restrictions

On Tuesday, Microsoft revealed not just a price increase for Xbox Game Pass, something that we all knew was coming eventually, but the introduction of an entirely new tier of the service. It’s not just the price hike, which for Ultimate is now up from $17 to $20 a month, but Microsoft is muddying the waters of Game Pass’s core appeal. Now, “Day One on Game Pass” now has an asterisk attached to it, and it adds to existing questions about the future of the service.

Here's a breakdown of the new pricing, features and the new tier added called “Game Pass Standard” which does not include Day One exclusive releases. We have:

• Game Pass Core (Formerly Xbox Live Gold) - $10 a month or $75 a year, can play online multiplayer and has a small collection of 25 accessible games.
• Game Pass Standard - $15 a month, no yearly bundle, has access to the full Game Pass game library except it does not have Day One launches of exclusives, as instead they will be added later after some unspecified time window.
• Game Pass Ultimate - $20 a month, no yearly bundle, access to full Game Pass library and Day One launches, access to cloud gaming
• PC Game Pass - $12 a month, no yearly bundle, with all of the above minus cloud gaming

So your options to get Day One launches are $240 a year for Game Pass Ultimate or getting the cheaper PC Game Pass which directly encourages…not buying an Xbox as even the service is cheaper there (though again, the vast majority of PC-only gamers are extremely Steam-loyal).

What is happening here seems clear and is being stated plainly by most analysts. Microsoft is having immense trouble continuing to grow Game Pass at scale and old ambitions of reaching metrics like 100 million subscribers seem impossibly out of reach. I’ve talked about the reasons for this as recently as yesterday, but the highlights are console subscriber saturation, limited PC reach and cloud Game Pass having an extremely limited appeal outside of those already in the Xbox ecosystem, rather than drawing in new gamers.

So what do you do? You raise the price and try to squeeze existing subscribers. Though I’ve seen many now say that $240 a year is a bridge too far.

On top of that, the new tier is either A) trying to retain cost-conscious subscribers at the cost of Day One releases, which has always been the main selling point of Game Pass or B) simply trying to shove them into Ultimate, which is the main goal.

The central idea of Game Pass has always been to subscribe to Game Pass and get all Xbox games, very simple and something its competition does not offer. But now there are two different tiers of Game Pass that do not have access to first party day one launches, confusing that message. Yes, it’s true that PS Plus has had its own irritating price increases, but PlayStation is not gambling its future on widespread PS Plus adoption like Xbox has done with Game Pass to this point. Now, this move feels reflective of the limits of that philosophy and the reality of a market with a very clear ceiling. This is not Netflix. It will never have that reach, that much is clear, even if that was Microsoft’s original intention.

This is a bad move. A flat price increase would have been one thing, and $240 would have cancelled a lot of subs by itself, but what Microsoft is doing is fundamentally watering down the central idea of Game Pass, and it’s going to be tough to message its appeal as effectively going forward.

Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram.

Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.