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Game Pass inherits problems from Xbox
I imagine that there’d be more in the “used to subscribe” if we had asked a year ago. In October of 2025 Microsoft finally realized that its eyes were bigger than its stomach, and raised prices from $20 to $30 a month for Game Pass Ultimate, right ahead of the release of Call of Duty: Black Ops 7. After a bunch of layoffs and a leadership shakeup, the price was lowered back down to $23 a month for Ultimate…notably missing the blockbuster day-one releases of new Call of Duty games. They’ll come to the service a year later.
As we discussed, Game Pass isn’t going anywhere, at least for the next few years. Microsoft has spent the better part of a decade building up this service as the future of not just the Xbox platform, but its own gaming ambitions. It has spent a hundred billion dollars, give or take, to grow its catalog of publishers and developers. That’s freight train levels of corporate inertia — even slashing thousands of jobs won’t turn it around. It basically has to keep trying, for a while, or abandon all that money and work.
Microsoft
But as bad a place as Xbox is in right now, as much as the “This is an Xbox” campaign appears to have flopped, Microsoft is uniquely positioned to offer an egg in This Trying Time. Microsoft can decouple its gaming content, both “Xbox” (whatever that means anymore) and PC, from hardware…which is only getting more and more expensive. It can do so in a way that Sony and Nintendo can’t. Other companies with vast cloud infrastructure have tried this — Google, Amazon, Netflix. But Microsoft is the one with the brand, the pedigree, and crucially, the games.
“This is an Xbox” was a good pitch, and it’s only more appealing when an actual Xbox costs $500 to $800. You’ve already got a phone and (probably) a laptop, and you don’t want to buy a new one if you don’t need to. Getting games you care about on those screens is still something a lot of people are interested in…especially if that “Project Helix” on the horizon costs anything near the Steam Machine it seems to be aping.
So that leaves me with the question: What does Microsoft need to do to get subscribers? More than offering new COD titles every year, and more than buying up the next mid-range game studio, since it’s tightening the purse strings. I came up with three pillars that it needs to focus on, specifically to appeal to me, a PC gamer who’d prefer to play pretty much everything in Steam.
Step One: Accessibility
This is the one that I think Microsoft has actually done a really good job at. The best thing about Game Pass is getting all those games, wherever you are, whatever you happen to have handy. A $100 kid’s tablet from Walmart can log in and stream Game Pass titles with no problem, so long as you have a decent connection. You can play Game Pass in a car, or on a fridge. It truly is the Netflix of gaming, at least in that sense.