It is time to call it a day on the Xbox Series X/S generation. What started off as a promising campaign backed by Microsoft’s (at the time) newly acquired studios has dwindled into a mess of studio closures, game cancellations and perhaps most depressingly, price hikes.
Microsoft has just raised the price of the Xbox Series X console five years after its debut and to top it off, they are now also charging 50% more per month for a Game Pass Ultimate subscription. The more I think about it, the less it appears that Microsoft had any concrete plans for its studios.
The Initiative was set up with world class talent, only for Microsoft to push them back out the door and hand the keys to Perfect Dark over to Crystal Dynamics. One year after properly revealing that game to the world, it was cancelled and The Initiative was shut down.
Turn 10 Studios, once hailed as a premier studio known for getting the absolute most out of Xbox hardware, has been gutted and relegated to support studio status. Zenimax Online Studios – also gutted, despite reports of a highly promising new MMO project. Tango Gameworks, Microsoft’s lone foothold in the Japanese game development market, was sold off after shipping one of the best surprise games of 2024 in Hi-FI Rush.
Arkane Austin, the studio best known for its work on immersive sims like Prey, was shut down after being saddled with Redfall, a game that nobody wanted to buy and more importantly, nobody at the studio wanted to make.
Rare Studios has undergone major cuts after failing to ship a game since Sea of Thieves. Creative Affinity’s Halo spin-off game was cancelled. Contraband, a game prominently announced in 2021, had its funding pulled this year, leaving the studio behind it to scramble for a new publisher.
At the rate things are going over at Xbox, I’ll consider it a miracle if the Fable reboot actually makes it out of the door.
On the back of all these cuts, cancellations and closures, Microsoft now wants to charge more money for Game Pass. They claim they’ve shipped more day-one games on the service than ever before, but how many of those games were actually impactful? If Call of Duty couldn’t make a meaningful dent, what makes them think that a dozen extra indie games and a few first-party AAA titles will?
Game Pass has secured some decent third-party deals in the past, but they are few and far between. The only ones I ended up booting up my Xbox app for in recent years were A Plague Tale: Requiem, Stalker 2, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Atomic Hearts and Rematch. Out of that bunch, there are only two that I would actually buy. Outside of that, I primarily used my subscription to play a maximum of four day-one Xbox titles a year.
Microsoft justified the recent Xbox Game Pass Ultimate price increase with the promise of 75 day-one games next year. Fable will be one, Gears E-Day will be another, COD 2026 will also make it over. Who knows what the other 70+ titles will be, but history has so far conditioned me to expect maybe one or two standouts for the year, while the rest will be thoroughly uninteresting.
Additions like Ubisoft Classics and Fortnite Crew do absolutely nothing to move the needle. Most have already had their fill of Assassin’s Creed and if they haven’t, then the older games in the series can be purchased all together for around the same price as one month of Game Pass Ultimate. If you love Fortnite enough to subscribe to it, then chances are, you aren’t playing much on Game Pass anyway, so I ask – who are these additions for?
These additions to the package can’t be bringing much value to the average subscriber outside of fringe cases. Xbox could turn to its improved cloud gaming offering and call that value, but how big is the cloud gaming market really? In court as part of its argument for why the Activision Blizzard acquisition should be approved, Microsoft admitted that cloud gaming barely has a market right now. As a result, Activision games are available under a free license to all cloud gaming services.
With Game Pass Ultimate rising to around £240 per year, it is now more affordable for me to just buy the 3-4 Xbox games I want on Steam than to carry on with my subscription. Sure, the ‘value' has been ‘boosted' in other areas, but are they areas anyone really cares about? Is a Fortnite battle pass and expanded access to old Ubisoft titles something that meaningfully changes the value proposition of Game Pass Ultimate to the tune of 50% more money per month? To me, the answer is no.
It just really feels like they jumped the gun, expecting the illusion of good value to hold up, without doing enough to earn that reputation.
There is one lone subscription offering here that might still be worth it. PC Game Pass still exists and still includes all of the same benefits it had prior to the recent restructuring, at around £10 less per month than Game Pass Ultimate. But how long will it be before Microsoft decides to move the goalposts there too? My guess would be not too long.
Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.
KitGuru Says: Are you sticking with Game Pass after the recent price hike?
The post
KitGuru Games: After 7 years, I’m cancelling Xbox Game Pass first appeared on
KitGuru.
Connexion
