Playing Xbox is Getting a Lot More Expensive. Now What? ⭐

It’s not just Xbox—we’re seeing price hikes all over the videogame industry—but this week was a wake-up call for gamers, with Microsoft raising the price of Game Pass Ultimate by 50 percent to a heady $29.99 per month. But the real-world impact of that one price increase is actually quite a bit more than 50 percent, as discussed below. And if you’ve invested a lot of time and money in Xbox or any other gaming ecosystem, you have some thinking to do.

As do I. But this is where I’m at right now, keeping mostly to the Xbox ecosystem that I care about the most.

? Yep, that’s what this is

At a high level, what we’re seeing across the industry, whether it’s the cost of gaming hardware, individual game titles, or subscriptions like Game Pass, is the same thing we see throughout personal technologies these day: It’s enshittification, plain and simple.

This perfect word was coined by Cory Doctorow, and he defines it as the process by which platforms die: “First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”

Xbox started off as being good to users. When the console business started failing, Microsoft pivoted with Game Pass, and that was good to users. But then Xbox started punishing its users with price increases, less capable hardware than the competition, and other problems. And now it’s abusing us by removing perks we came to rely on and raising prices yet again. It’s a classic example of enshittification.

? Console prices go up, up, up

If you think about videogame console prices, it’s maybe a little too easy to point a finger at this year’s insane and counterproductive U.S. tariffs. That’s a big part of the reason for these changes this year. But console hardware prices have been increasing for a long time.

For example, it’s fair to blame tariffs on the higher-than-expected prices of the ROG Xbox Ally gaming handhelds that you can now preorder: Microsoft needs these devices to be successful, and it and/or ASUS would absolutely price these devices, especially the $999 higher-end SKU, at more affordable levels if possible.

And tariffs also play a side role in a historical first: This year alone, Microsoft has raised the price of its Xbox Series X|S consoles twice. Granted, some of that is likely tied to Microsoft trying to distance itself from first-party hardware sales ahead of an expected exit from that market. But the second of those price hikes is clearly tariff-based.

But Xbox prices have increased in each generation, at least until the current one. The OG Xbox was $299 when it launched in 2001, the Xbox 360 started off at $399 (2005), and the Xbox One was $499 (2013) before Microsoft introduced two consoles side-by-side in 2020: The Xbox Series S started off at $299 and the Xbox Series X was $499. (I’m not accounting for inflation here, but you get the idea.) Starting soon, the Xbox Series S will cost $339 to $449, depending on configuration, and the Xbox Series X will cost $599 to $799.

What’s curious about this to me is that Microsoft, like other console makers, releases cost reduced models over time to help it lower losses or even make these devices profitable. In doing so, it doesn’t pass the savings along to the consumer, it scrapes back as much off its losses as it can. But we never really got cost-reduced Xbox Series X|S consoles. Instead, it refreshed those consoles in late 2024 with subtly improved models that were more expensive than those they replaced. Today, of course, they’re even more expensive.

? Game costs go up, up, up

Game titles have followed a similar trajectory. This wasn’t always the case—Nintendo NES games could cost up to $50 by the time that device wound down (in the U.S.) in the early 1990s—but in the modern era, we settled into a $59.99 price point for new AAA titles across all consoles and the PC, starting with the Xbox 360 in 2005. That price point remained in effect until 2020, when the first $69.99 AAA titles appeared. And then we jumped to $79.99 this past May. So where the $59.99 era lasted 15 years, the $69.99 era lasted just 5 years.

Not exactly, I know. There are a few qualifiers to this (again, not counting inflation).

First, not all AAA games are switching to $79.99 this year. Microsoft, for example, read the room for a change and lowered the price of The Outer Worlds back down to $69.99 before the game even launched after having announced it at $79.99. Clearly, there is some pushback.

And games are much, much more expensive today than ever before. Indeed, they’ve been on an upward trajectory for years, and AAA titles like those in the Call of Duty series don’t just make more money than the biggest Hollywood movie hits, they cost more—sometimes a lot more—and take much longer to make than those movies. Ten year ago, Activision spent $450 million making Call of Duty: Black Ops III. In 2020, it spent $700 million making Black Ops: Cold War (and sold fewer copies while doing so).

What’s curious about this to me is that mobile disrupted the videogame market starting with the iPhone in 2007 and then accelerating in later years, and the pricing model there is much lower, even today: Mobile ushered in a now-common free-to-play model with in-game purchases, plus ad-supported, smaller, and simpler games. Today, you can buy some games on mobile at very high prices, like Resident Evil Village for the iPhone, which costs $39.99 plus $4.99 for an all-access voucher and $19.99 for a DLC (downloadable content) pack. But these are rare, and most mobile games, even sophisticated titles like Call of Duty: Mobile, are free or inexpensive.

Given the popularity of mobile and how these devices have matured into killer gaming machines, you would think that would impact the price of console and PC games, in that it might lower prices or at least maintain prices. But that’s not the case.

?️ Game subscription costs go up, up, up

Xbox Live Gold debuted in 2002 for $49.99 per year, and Microsoft added monthly and quarterly payment options over time. Xbox Game Pass debuted in 2017 as a subscription service for Xbox gamers at a cost of $9.99 per month, though Xbox Live Gold remained in the market. It provided a library of 100 Xbox 360 and Xbox One games and was, in my words, “the hidden gem in Microsoft’s Xbox strategy” and “an incredible, incredible value.” Xbox Game Pass got better and better over the years, too, expanded into multiple tiers, eventually killed off Xbox Live Gold, and then it inevitably got more expensive.

A lot more expensive. Yes, the base Xbox Game Pass Essential subscription, which replaced Game Pass Core, which replaced Xbox Game Pass, is still $9.99 per month. But Microsoft no longer offers other buying options. So that will set you back $120 per year, or $70 more than an Xbox Live Gold subscription did 20 years ago. (Yes, inflation. And yes, it offers more value.) Xbox Game Pass Premium is $14.99 per month. And the price of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate jumped an astonishing 50 percent to $29.99 per month.

And I have many thoughts about all that.

As noted up top, the price hike isn’t just 50 percent. Because you can no longer pay for Game Pass in quarterly or annual allotments, all the tiers are more expensive, but Ultimate even more so: At $29.99 per month, this subscription now costs $360 per year. Previously, it was $240 per year, but if there had been the usual discount on an annual subscription, that would have been $200. And that means this is really an 80 percent price hike.

Actually, it could be more than that: Previous to this change, you could apply Xbox Rewards points, which you earn by playing games and buying games and accessories, to your monthly Game Pass subscription cost. But now, you can’t, and while you can still use these points to buy Xbox gift cards, the conversion rate is almost exponentially lower. Point being, it’s not worth it.

And that’s where we get into a stickier, less obvious problem that’s tied to the enshittification blurb I started with. That is, there are costs in terms of literal money, but there are also other types of costs that are more nebulous. Including what happens when some product or service you rely on that was always a great value … suddenly isn’t.

⤵️ The value of Xbox Game Pass goes down, down, down

Game Pass didn’t just get better over time, it expanded into multiple tiers that evolved in time too. For a while there, it was logical enough with Xbox Game Pass for consoles, PC Game Pass for PCs, and Xbox Game Pass Ultimate for both plus cloud streaming.

But then the enshittification started.

Game Pass started off as the ultimate “making lemonade” moment for gamers: Microsoft would have been content to simply follow the models set by Sony and Nintendo, but because it lost the console wars over each generation, it was forced to press reset. And the result was the most gamer-friendly ecosystem imaginable, with all kinds of advantages from backward compatibility to cross-play, cross-progression, and everything else. But then Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard, its biggest ever acquisition at $88 billion. And everything changed.

Though Microsoft was careful not to worry Xbox diehards, this turned Xbox from a console-focused business into a cross-platform game publisher. That meant hardware, a money-loser, was much less important. It meant that games would be published on competing hardware, both in mobile and consoles. And it meant that one of Xbox Game Pass’s best perks, day one availability of all Microsoft Studios published titles, had to die. Activision has far more AAA titles than Microsoft did before, and it could not afford to lose all the revenues from individual game sales on Xbox and PC.

The first major enshittification of Xbox Game Pass came in mid-2024, when Microsoft killed the console-based Game Pass (which had cost $10.99 per month by that point) and replaced it with Game Pass Standard, which eliminated the day one perk and cost $14.99 per month. At that time, the price of Game Pass Core jumped to $74.99 per year (up from $59.99), PC Game Pass was $11.99 per month (up from $9.99), and Game Pass Ultimate was $19.99 per month (up from $16.99).

The loss of the day one perk and $5 per month price increase were in-your-face, and Xbox fans predictably and correctly howled. But this was also understandable for the reason noted above.

The changes to the non-Ultimate Game Pass tiers this week are subtler but also designed to nickel and dime customers in less obvious ways. And the changes to Game Pass Ultimate are the next major enshittification moment. They’re so in-your-face I wonder whether it’s purposeful: In addition to being the only Game Pass tier to offer the day one perk, which makes it expensive to run, the pricing is so off the charts that it feels designed to force gamers to switch to a lower-cost tier that will save it money too. I know, it sounds wrong, but I suspect Microsoft can make more money if all Game Pass Ultimate customers switched to the next tier down.

And this is where we must consider intent. Microsoft positioned the changes it announced this week as a win for gamers. But the biggest changes were made to benefit Microsoft, and Xbox as a business, not you. And when a relationship like this transitions from a win-win to a more toxic, one-sided relationship in which Microsoft benefits far more than its customers, well, we have a problem. That’s when, in this case, Game Pass became fully enshittified. It’s no longer a no-brainer, is not always a great value, and we have lost so much of what made this thing great that it’s almost not recognizable.

I do think that Game Pass is still a valuable service, at least to those who play enough different games on an ongoing basis. But I also believe that the potential audience size here has shrunk, not grown, because of these changes. And that Game Pass Ultimate, in particular, is a notably bad offering now.

⬇️ What about game titles and consoles?

No one can make a case that the Xbox console isn’t enshittified. In addition to the massive price hikes noted above, we never got meaningful upgrades to either model. With the Xbox One, for example, Microsoft followed up with the Xbox One S and Xbox One X over time. Nintendo shipped at least three variants of the Switch before moving to the Switch 2 this year. And even Sony, which launched two console models at the same time with the PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 5 Digital Edition, similar to what Microsoft did, followed those up with a cost-reduced “Slim” model and a PS5 Pro. Other than simply stating that it wishes to exit the console market and alienate those fans as quickly as possible, it’s not clear what else Microsoft could have done to communicate how little it now cares about these products.

On the game title front, there are the price increases noted above, of course. But as with the Game Pass price hikes, there’s more going on there. When Microsoft switched to digital game downloads and eventually wound down physical sales as much as possible, it saved an enormous amount of money in manufacturing costs, but also infrastructure costs because the games could always be up-to-date at the time of purchase, lessening future download times. And so it’s not just that AAA titles are $20 more expensive than they were 6 years ago, but they should actually be even less expensive. Or at least not as expensive, if that makes sense.

It’s also possible that most of the industry has already crested the game development cost wave thanks to AI and its ability to generate content. Future games will be made much more cost effectively than is the case today thanks to AI, and I think we’re only just beginning to understand this.

Consider a game like Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, which will launch soon across multiple platforms. COD titles typically ship with a small set of multiplayer maps, and then Activision’s studios provide more over the coming year. One of the things that sets apart this new game is that it will ship with about twice as many multiplayer maps at launch as is usually the case. And that’s nice. But these things are ideal for AI: Activision has decades of data about the maps that were made over all the games, which worked well, which didn’t, and so on, and that could feed AI nicely. It could just make more of the types or styles of maps that gamers like the most.

Only one thing is clear. Microsoft, like other game makers, will never pass the savings along to us.

? What can we do?

The problem I have with all this is that the cost of gaming has risen incommensurately with the time I have to play games when compared to other types of entertainment I enjoy. Xbox Game Pass Ultimate is now more expensive than the most expensive Netflix tier, the most expensive Spotify Family tier, and anything else you care to mention. And yet I, and I many others, would spend much more time enjoying those types of services than playing games.

Mobile has also democratized gaming in an interesting way, not just for pricing, but for availability, convenience, an location. You can game anywhere now, and gaming on an Xbox console or a Windows gaming PC that’s locked to a single room in a single building feels antiquated. This is the wrong time to make things worse.

There are solutions all around us, of course.

Thanks to improvements to Windows and a coming wave of further improvements tied to Xbox Ally gaming handhelds, the PC is a better platform for gaming than ever, and not just for those who spend thousands on the latest video cards and other upgrades. PC gaming opens up new opportunities, but it also lets you continue using Game Pass if you want to go that route.

PC gaming also lets you take advantage of other gaming stores, like Steam, GOG, and others. There are frequently sales, but services like Amazon Prime Gaming and the Epic Games Store give away good games for free every month. It’s worth looking into these things.

Nintendo and Sony have much more successful console platforms. Just saying.

Mobile has really come of age and a modern smartphone or iPad can play games that look and feel as good as anything on a console. This is an interesting avenue for those that want to eliminate a device, don’t have high-end gaming aspirations, and enjoy the ability to play anytime in any place.

Even sticking within the Xbox ecosystem with a console you can make some changes. Look at the past year, figure out how many games you really played, and see whether it makes sense financially to move down a tier or two if you want to keep Game Pass. Or cancel it and rejoin temporarily only when that one game you do want to play hits the service.

In the end, this is a personal decision, but the shame here is that the need to make it was thrust on us and is unwanted. I can and do defend Microsoft’s decision to transition Xbox away from consoles. But a big part of what we were moving to, the whole “every screen is an Xbox” thing, is built on a Game Pass foundation. And now that foundation seems a lot more shaky all of a sudden. It’s not good.