Black Ops 7

Xbox

New Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has rolled out her first major decision, one of many likely to reverse some of Xbox’s major changes and pursuits over the past few years. That would be undoing the enormous, ridiculous 50% price increase to Xbox Game Pass from $20 to $30 a month. Now, that’s been hacked back down, but not all the way, and there’s a catch.

Game Pass Ultimate will drop from $30 a month to $23 a month, a 23% drop this time, though still a 15% increase from the old figure. PC Game Pass is down from $16.50 to $14 as well.

The catch here is something that was rumored before today’s announcement, that Xbox will now remove future Call of Duty titles as Game Pass Day One launches, and they will only be added a full year later. This does not affect current COD titles players already have access to, but yes, that will start this fall with the as-of-yet unannounced new entry. There is no word about a potential discount for Game Pass subscribers, but doing the math, $240+$70= $310 to buy COD independently is still less than the $360 price based on the former $30 a month. But since that price was totally crazy, I’m not sure this is exactly an epic win. It’s still worse than where things were before all this.

Day One Call of Duty launches on Game Pass were one of the most important sign-up draws once that series went under Microsoft’s umbrella. Now, if that’s removed, even with that “technically the math is better” situation, that’s likely to result in more cancellations.

The main issue with Game Pass remains, that it seems to have smashed pretty hard into a ceiling with more or less everyone in the Xbox ecosystem making up their minds about it, and lacking some new mass draw of non-console gamers. Now, with price increases, things being outright removed and endless cross-platform launches, there’s no reason to think subscriptions aren’t falling at this point. The exclusive game issue is likely the next major problem to be tackled, though even this current Game Pass fix is “well, it’s not quite as bad as it was.” The problem seems to be that the math just has not been working for Microsoft, or else none of this would even be happening.

Is this a good development? Sure. Is this a signal that Sharma is set to reverse some number of poorly-conceived Xbox policies going forward? I’d say so. But there are so many to wade through and no easy answers for most of them, given the state the brand finds itself in.

Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Bluesky and Instagram.

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