Microsoft's whole plan with Game Pass was that by buying up half the industry they'd get enough subscribers to justify the massive expense of buying and funding all those studios, but subscriber growth went flat far sooner than they expected. It's bad enough that Microsoft hasn't updated the official subscriber figures since 2024, but from a former Game Pass manager's figures on LinkedIn it's only grown from 34 million subscribers in 2024 to 35 million this year. I imagine this new free plan is a ploy to increase the number of subscribers they can report so Game Pass looks like less of a disaster. To compare, there's at least 10 million fewer Game Pass subscribers now than there were Xbox Live subscribers in 2015 (48 million). This is a fair comparison to make because Xbox Live got rolled into Game Pass a couple years ago (called Game Pass Core) as part of a previous attempt to juice the Game Pass subscriber numbers.
For one example of how Game Pass affects game sales, Microsoft internally estimated they lost $300 million in sales of Call of Duty Black Ops 6, the first Call of Duty game they published after buying Activision, due to Game Pass (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-03/xbox-s-ga...). They would have needed 15 million new subscribers for 1 month, or 1.25 million subscribers for 1 year, to make up the difference in lost sales. I don't think it's any wonder that we're seeing Microsoft hike the price on Game Pass and lay off thousands of game developers. I just wish they'd thought through all this beforehand so we could have avoided messing up all these people's livelihoods for what is a fundamentally bad idea (selling $60-70 games on a $15-$20 subscription).
It's not surprising that game pass is failing. We got an Xbox Series X over Playstation because of Game Pass. We subscribed to Game Pass Ultimate in April 2023 for 12.99 Euro per month. Now little over two years later, the same subscription is 26.99 Euro (more than doubled).
It's great that it has quite a lot of games, but in practice we only played a small number of titles. This was fine for the original price, the benefit over buying games was that you could try more titles before choosing what you like to play. But we are certainly not going to pay 26.99 monthly for games that you do not own in the end.
It kind of feels gross/bait-and-switch'y.
In the meanwhile the Xbox is collecting dust we got a Switch 2. Sure, Switch 2 titles are expensive, but at least you own them.
I love the idea of GamePass (unlimited games for one small monthly fee) because it reminds me of Sega Channel on the Genesis back in the 90s.
But in practice, games that I’m into take 20+ hours to finish, and with my busy schedule, a $60 game gets stretched out to a year or so, so GamePass’ $15 fee (which is a lot higher now!) becomes too expensive
One fundamental difference is that Sega Channel was mostly comprised of games that were years old and often out of print entirely. New games were only available on the service as either time or content limited demos or as pay-per-view games for an extra fee. They didn't do the thing Microsoft does where all their games are available for free on Game Pass at launch. This meant that Sega Channel was mainly a way for publishers to get a little bit of extra money out of their back catalogs, it didn't compete for game sales with new titles like Game Pass does.
I checked my steam account history and feel like I buy/play a lot of games. Almost never do I buy the $60-70 games except from nintendo, but anyway I'm still $100 short of the gamepass pricing over the year. And I've bought every helldivers 2 dlc.
I think gamepass numbers are lower than expected because of hardware.
Xbox hardware is not as widely available as PlayStation. Maybe it is in USA but in Europe every electronics shop has PS5 section and almost never xbox. I have to go out of my way to find an xbox console to buy while I've seen PS5s being sold at a supermarket. On top of that Cloud gaming is available in a handful of countries making gamepass ultimate half baked for the rest of the world.
> I imagine this new free plan is a ploy to increase the number of subscribers they can report so Game Pass looks like less of a disaster.
I wonder if it will offset all the cancellations they had due to the recent price hike.
Enough came through that it crashed their subscription cancellation page for quite a while and (admittedly anecdotally) I know half a dozen people (including myself) who decided the new price wasn't a good value and cancelled over the past week.
They could do staged releases, where you pay $30 extra to get access to the game 2 months earlier or #50 to get beta access as much as a year early (with warnings about stability). There's a decent chance that could make up the difference.
Still IMO better than Ads either in the larger streaming or in-game... or micro-transactions, or a number of other things that make gameplay worse.
For one example of how Game Pass affects game sales, Microsoft internally estimated they lost $300 million in sales of Call of Duty Black Ops 6, the first Call of Duty game they published after buying Activision, due to Game Pass (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-03/xbox-s-ga...). They would have needed 15 million new subscribers for 1 month, or 1.25 million subscribers for 1 year, to make up the difference in lost sales. I don't think it's any wonder that we're seeing Microsoft hike the price on Game Pass and lay off thousands of game developers. I just wish they'd thought through all this beforehand so we could have avoided messing up all these people's livelihoods for what is a fundamentally bad idea (selling $60-70 games on a $15-$20 subscription).