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...