Xbox Game Pass has gone through several transformations since its launch in 2017, but the latest change to Microsoft’s gaming subscriptions service is its most significant. On Oct. 1, Xbox revealed a major overhaul to the service’s tier and price structure. PC Game Pass is going away, revamped Essential and Premium tiers are replacing Core and Standard, and cloud streaming is rolling out to more subscribers.
That sounds fairly standard, but there’s a pricey caveat: Xbox Game Pass Ultimate is getting a major price hike. That will now cost you $30 a month, up from $20, if you want to access to day-one releases, including Xbox’s suite of first party exclusives. You won’t get that perk with the more inexpensive tiers. Considering that Game Pass’ most enticing value has always been its day and date new releases, that’s a massive change.
Whether or not it’s still worth it for you, there’s no denying a simple fact: The era of Xbox Game Pass being the “best deal in gaming” is firmly over.
Let’s put the pricing into perspective. When Game Pass first launched in 2017, a subscription would run you $10 a month, or $120 a year. That pricing would shift around as Xbox retooled and expanded what the service offered, but it always remained low enough to make it a value — especially if you were subscribing for new releases. Anytime I’d talk to friends about whether or not Game Pass was worth it through the early 2020s, somebody would inevitably crunch the numbers and point out that you’d only need to play two big budget games per year to get your money’s worth of an annual subscription. In 2021, you simply had to play the Halo: Infinite campaign and Forza Horizon 5 to come out even. When you laid it out like that, Game Pass was a no brainer. So long as you were going to play those games anyway, you were saving money.
The value always felt impossible, so it was no surprise when Xbox entirely overhauled the service’s pricing model in 2024. Xbox Game Pass Ultimate bumped up to $20 per month, making it a $240 annual cost. That move wasn’t without context. Xbox had just bought Activision Blizzard, which meant that the service would get an influx of major day one releases like Call of Duty: Black Ops 6. The price hike was hard to stomach, but we were still talking about a service that paid itself off after four full-priced games. That wasn’t even factoring in third-party games either, which gave the service more value. Just this year, a $20 monthly subscription would have netted you Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Blue Prince, and Hollow Knight: Silksong in addition to first-party juggernauts like Avowed and Doom: The Dark Ages.
With the new tier change, the calculus has slipped out of Xbox’s favor. In order to get your money’s worth in terms of new releases, you’d now need to play six games that retail for $70 a year to come out positive. (That math hops around a bit if you factor in the variable pricing in smaller and bigger first-party games.) In the past, you could be sure that you’d probably play two new games a year, but six? It’s not that that’s a ludicrous number of games for a player to tackle in a year. It’s that you can’t really be confident that the service will get six games you definitely want to play in a given year, especially in the wake of Xbox canceling anticipated projects like Perfect Dark and Everwild. At that point, it might be more cost-effective to go back to buying Xbox games à la carte.
There are still some comparatively inexpensive tiers that come with their own perks. For $15 a month, you can still get access to 200+ games and cloud streaming via Premium. Essential subscribers still get 50+ games, cloud streaming, and PC access for $10 a month. They aren’t raw deals for casual players, but neither gives you the actual selling point of Game Pass.
When I start to crunch the numbers, another (similarly named) subscription service comes to my mind: MoviePass. Back in the mid 2010s, the movie ticketing app made a huge splash by unveiling an unlimited plan that would let you see as many movies as you wanted in theaters with virtually no restrictions. It was a flat out absurd value depending on where you lived. Every single friend I had in New York City at the time signed up for it and was going to the movies weekly. It made sense; a movie ticket would run you around $20 at the time, and that’s about how much you were paying a month for MoviePass. Even seeing two movies a month was a two-times return on investment.
We all knew it couldn’t last. It felt like we had accessed a cheat code that was most assuredly bankrupting a company that had no idea how much people would take advantage of the service. That’s how Game Pass often felt in the early 2020s too; it was too good to be true.
Reality caught up with MoviePass eventually. The unlimited plan went the way of the dodo, with the service folding existing subscribers into a less appealing limited plan. Perhaps the hope would be that MoviePass had become so essential to subscribers that they wouldn’t want to let go, even if the deal wasn’t as unbelievable anymore. If that was the plan, it didn’t work. MoviePass bled subscribers, got hit with class action lawsuits over its tactics, and eventually shuttered for a few years before a muted relaunch. It didn’t matter that it was a household name for a golden era. A crappy deal is a crappy deal.
The hard truth is that nobody needs an entertainment subscription service. It’s a fun bonus in our hierarchy of needs that will always hinge on how good of a deal you’re getting for the price. Every price hike comes with a level of hubris that supposes the service is an essential enough piece of someone’s life that they’ll never unsubscribe. (Or that they’ll simply forget to.) Giving people a chance to question whether or not it’s worth it can be a death sentence for a subscription service. And at $30 a month, you’ve got to start asking questions for the sake of your budget.
