For eight years, Game Pass has been not only a pioneering subscription service in gaming, but the industry's best bargain. That is no longer the case. While the structure of Xbox's subscription tiers regularly shifted, and occasional price hikes were met with ire from users, the latest alteration to the service has gravely undercut its value to consumers. Game Pass Ultimate in particular is no longer the stellar deal it was.
Microsoft announced that Game Pass has homogenized its Xbox and PC versions into three universal tiers: Essential, Premium, and Ultimate. This completes the steady sequestering of day-one releases to the Ultimate level, which is accompanied by a new, too expensive price. Despite its best efforts to dress up the new iterations of Game Pass, Microsoft has only succeeded in killing the best deal in gaming.
New Xbox Game Pass Tiers Come With Huge Price Hike
Ultimate Gets A 50% Increase
Nearly 15 months after the last Game Pass price increase, Microsoft has once again shuffled its subscription tiers, renaming them, altering their offerings, and setting new price points. Here's a quick breakdown of what each new Game Pass level includes and how much it costs.
Tier | Essential | Premium | Ultimate |
|---|---|---|---|
Price | |||
Benefits |
So ends the distinction between Xbox Game Pass and Game Pass for PC. All three tiers are platform-agnostic – you might even be able to play in your car soon. The adoption of Essential and Premium interestingly draws parallels to Sony's competing subscription service, PlayStation Plus, which has Essential, Extra, and Premium as its three offerings.
Xbox Game Pass Essential is roughly equivalent to PS Plus Essential, just with a backlog of around 50, some presumably rotating games, instead of offering three new games to claim each month. Game Pass Premium and Ultimate differentiate themselves from PS Plus Extra and Premium by virtue of carrying on Microsoft's focus on bringing brand-new games to its catalog.
While getting new games published by Xbox within a year of their release is quite a good deal for the subscription price, Call of Duty being excluded is the real kicker. Many who avoid Activision's yearly FPS giant won't necessarily care, but CoD had become a recent boon to Game Pass's value. Even getting each entry at no extra cost post-launch would still be enticing from a monetary standpoint, but that possibility is apparently being seen as money left on the table.
It's also notable how much of a focus there is on the quantity of benefits. Vague "in-game benefits" aren't really universally valuable; you have to be playing the game they're a part of. Tying online console multiplayer to a subscription is inherently predatory toward consumers; the scaling efficacy of cloud gaming is similar. Cash back (essentially) via rewards is nice, I suppose, but it's just another motivator to keep you consistently engaged with the Game Pass ecosystem.
Game Pass Ultimate Is No Longer A Great Deal
RIP To A Real One
The abundance strategy really becomes glaring in the new Game Pass Ultimate benefits. EA Play still being included is great, and Ubisoft+ Classics' inclusion is only moderately enticing if you have any interest in playing the publisher's older titles. Like the in-game rewards, Fortnite's Crew subscription being included is only a benefit if you play that specific game.
But the big attraction, the reason people subscribe to Game Pass, is the day-one releases. Game Pass's incredible promise was, for a reasonable monthly price, you could play every Xbox Game Studios title and many third-party releases, on launch day at no additional cost. Most of that hasn't changed, but the new monthly price is a tough sell.
The yearly cost of Game Pass Ultimate is now $360; there is no option to bundle 12 months together at a discount. Taking the usual prices for new, AAA games – $60 or $70 – you're essentially paying for five or six brand-new games per year. Even for the most dedicated enthusiasts who use Xbox as their primary platform or play almost exclusively through Game Pass on PC, $30 every month is steep – 150% of what you previously paid.
But the vast majority of people who play video games do not purchase five or six new games every year. If you subscribe to Ultimate to play a specific game, and take longer than a month to finish it, you've paid the same amount to not own it (digital game licenses aren't ownership anyway, but that's another issue entirely).
Game Pass Ultimate isn't much of a bargain anymore. If gaming is your predominant hobby, and you play almost exclusively through Game Pass, then Ultimate might save you some money, but it's eschewing the reputation that made it so popular in the first place. This hike and the recent increase in Xbox console prices (a two-terabyte Series X now costs a whopping $800) make the barrier to entry for Microsoft's gaming ecosystem incredibly high.
And it's an odd strategy, considering hardware sales are way down, and Game Pass has been the only resounding success at Xbox for the last two console generations. Game Pass, and specifically its Ultimate tier, has long been the gold standard every other gaming subscription service was compared to, but it isn't any longer. Rest in peace to the greatest deal in gaming, you will be missed.
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