Never fun for anybody
Meanwhile, at Microsoft:
No, but, but, think of the shareholders! Nobody ever thinks about the shareholders! :(((
MSFT has been lagging behind the S&P this week. I doubt they’re super thrilled.
They’re also upping the sub price for some home user office plans. Apparently it’s milk the customer time at microsoft.
Part of the problem is that most of the people making these decisions have been seeing their incomes and net worth increase steadily over the past decade. They don’t truly understand their subscriber base.
But they do understand “charge what the market will bear”. It’s all about short term profit.
Thanks for letting me know, I’ve been paying just for some spare OneDrive space but I think I’ll cut it if they’re raising the price
My boss showed me the article yesterday, but apparently it’s the old news from earlier this year. It went from 70 to 100 back in Feb.
That’s still a giant increase from whatever you would have paid last year.
Oh yeah that was when they announced you’d get copilot credits or whatever as part of Office 365 and bumped up the price.
Xbox: “Price Increases Are Never Fun For Anybody”
Meanwhile Xbox execs:
I remember when GamePass was first announced and everybody lauded Microsoft for being “pro-consumer” and outright cheered when they started buying up independent studios.
I remember being downvoted to oblivion for pointing out the very obvious 5 year plan for GP and the fact that it would go… exactly the way it’s currently going.
I’ve been in the fuck subscriptions camp. Sony locking multiplayer behind PS+ was wha5 led me to dropping consoles as my primary gaming system, since I refused to pay for multiplayer.
I don’t mind subscriptions for ongoing infrastructure as much. My problem is with using a subscription to replace ownership.
If they are charging to multiplayer why wouldn’t they want to replace ownership too so they get money every month.
Platform infrastructure like PSN costs an inordinate amount of money. People owning games they paid for does not cost you any money.you already made your money back by selling them the ownership.
Sounds like excuses when PS3 and Nintendo Wii, WiiU, and Nintendo DS had free multiplayer and it was after Sony decided to start charging Nintendo also jumped onboard because they saw peope like you were easy to take their money.
I don’t even know why you’d have a problem with Xbox charging more for their subscription when you already argue for paid online.
Yes, charging customers for a product that costs you money to maintain is an excuse, and a valid one. Sony and Nintendo were giving away an expensive service for free to the user. It was generous, and a way to reduce friction with onboarding new users.
They jumped on board because maintaining that infrastructure has become exponentially more expensive to maintain today than it was 20 years ago.
I don’t even know why you’d have a problem with Xbox charging more for their subscription when you already argue for paid online.
Because unlike paid user services, game ownership is not something that costs them any money. They aren’t recouping their costs for a service they provide, it’s just rentseeking.
Yeah I don’t buy it. Nintendo does free across multiple hardware then when they saw they were the only one decided they’d start taking money too, since it is in a companies nature to maximize profits exponentially.
And then there’s Steam. Also in the hardware business and hosting games and mods and a bunch of other services even Epic with their Fortnite money hasn’t matched. Yet online is free.
You just sound like a consumer who iust accepts whatever methods companies try to exploit consumers and defend as necessary. More a stockholder than a consumer.
Tbf when Xbox first launched console multiplayer there was a monthly fee too.
That was anti-consumer from the get-go but it was also there from the start.
I never understood the praise at all. It’s literally turning DRM into a business model.
Lol that’s always been the business model
It’s because it was pretty much the Netflix of video games. Pay a subscription and you get access to a collection of games.
When it was 5.99 it was a no brainer. I think I cancelled mine around 13.99, though not because of the price but because I always forgot it existed and it tied me to windows. Switched to Linux and cancelling was a part of that transition.
I feel like I responded to this exact comment on Reddit years ago saying the same. The thing people don’t realize, is subscriptions give you zero control of ownership and it’s always in the best interest of the corp to bait and switch.
No doubt in my mind M$ employs obfuscated layers of (contracted) marketing to astroturf, including downvotes of your cautionary comments. The line between a fanboy and astroturfer is blurred.
Gaining subscribers/customers while bleeding money, then charging more money once your competitors are forced out of the market or investors want to cash out, is a basic strategy… I doubt Game Pass was ever profitable, it was all an illusion propped up by accounting tricks and obfuscated/discounted internal operating costs (where M$ can shift xbox costs to money-printing cloud services division).
No doubt after years of failed xbox, that Phil Spencer is just a corporate suit executing the vision of M$ as a whole (in which Games is just an inconvenient detail). Expect more of the same, bundling of other services, no actual good in-house games. Activision acquisition in part of this strategy to pump up Game Pass, since M$ internal studios have not produced anything noteworthy this generation. I expect the next xbox to have cheaper hardware to undercut ps6, but to have increased game pass incentives to make up for it. maybe a random bundle with netflix. you gotta think outside of the (x)box for whats coming next.
At the time, I predicted you were probably right - but it would still be a good value for the time that the price stayed low.
Sacrifice the future for a temporary revenue/profit go up
No, it will work out for them. They just made a 50% profit increase. I doubt if even 10% of subscribers cancel.
It worked for Netflix, Disney+, Hulu… People just need to stop buying shit, but they won’t.
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Even though I personally never used it I was astonished at how quickly so many people blindly trusted it. What I’m more astonished with is how quickly Microsoft has managed to destroy that brand trust.
Raising the price of hardware twice since May and now raising the price of game pass by 50% is not something a company would do if they’re interested in competing against Sony or Nintendo. Clearly Microsoft has thrown in the towel on XBOX. Only thing left for Microsoft to do is announce cancellation of next gen console altogether and do layoffs. I don’t know when that will happen but it’s inevitable at this point.
yup they’ll go the route of Sega. The writing has been on the wall with the Xbox Division for awhile now that I’m honestly surprised they’re still trying to “make it work”.
Xbox was a weird one. I haven’t used one since the 360 and honestly I couldn’t even begin to tell you what the next console in the line was after the 360. was it the series x? was it the one? I dont’ know. I mean after buying like 5 360s because of red ring or whatever why would I continue that idiocy?
Raising the price of hardware twice since May and now raising the price of game pass by 50% is not something a company does if they’re interested in competing against Sony or Nintendo.
But when Sony and Nintendo are doing the same thing…?
got any source for that on the nintendo side? Idc about sony.
Nintendo raised the price of the Switch 1 and most of their accessory products in the US and Canada in May for Canada and August for the US.
This was following price increases for Nintendo Switch Online in Latin American countries which started in January. Nintendo has not raised prices of the subscription globally, but in their press releases about increased costs of hardware, they state that “price adjustments may be necessary in the future” for NSO, presumably after evaluating trends when the free trial period of GameChat ends for Switch 2 early adopters in March 2026.
And I know you said you don’t care about Sony, but just to share sources, Sony has already increased the price of their hardware in Japan in August 2024; Europe, Australia, and New Zealand in March; and the US in August of this year.
This was following earlier price increases in 2022 for Canada, Japan, Europe, Australia, and Mexico.
Sony also increased the cost of PS+ in North America, Europe, and Japan back in 2023, more recently for Southeast Asia back in April, and there are rumors of another upcoming price increase to be announced at some point now that we’ve entered FY2026.
So all of this is just to illustrate that what Microsoft is doing isn’t really anything new—it’s just the latest development in a continuing industry-wide trend.
I the US it’s mostly due to the fascist tariffs, no? Latin America has a similar issue, tho that’s because of the tax system in for example Brazil. Considering the financial situation in Argentina, hyperinflation may make price increases necessary.
Sony, on the other hand, is known to raise prices, and may have been the pioneer of raising prices for their games and consoles. That’s why I didn’t care for them.
Why do we continue to give Nintendo excuses for their shitty anti-consumer practices?
If these are just because of US tariffs, why increase the price of Switch 1 consoles that are already in Canada and don’t need to be shipped through the US? Why increase digital games that aren’t being shipped at all? Not to mention, they opened the floodgates for the price increase in games.
I think you’re right that they don’t need to be shipped through the US, but they most probably are and will be, and using other suppliers or logistics firms that don’t isn’t always cheaper, especially with large volume shipments. Otherwise, even if there are consoles in storage, the increase has to be targeted at a whole market to also partially stave off the tariff costs and to unify a market on its conditions.
Also, Sony were the first to raise the prices for games beyond 60€.
Nintendo have also bumped their flagship game price up to 80 USD. I recall Sony doing the same (and see articles to that effect) but it looks like their games are still mostly at the 70 USD point?
Similarly, it is well worth noting that the Switch 2 announcement/deep dive videos specifically did NOT list the price or had vague reference to prices being announced regionally. This was primarily attributed to Liberation Day Tariffs but limited analyses do argue that the “base” price of the Switch 2 is higher than the Switch 1 which is consistent with increased engineering and overhead costs.
To my knowledge, Microsoft is the only platform ones who is bumping up their subscription fee cost. In large part because that seems to be all they have (in the gaming space). But all projections and leaks are that platform hardware costs are going to be significantly higher next generation (so like 2026/2027) and game prices are similarly expected to re-stabilize with “full” games being 80 USD as a baseline and all discount prices shifting accordingly.
Like, fuck Microsoft and this reeks of trying to grab the bag before closing (the xbox) shop considering how precarious everything is. But realize this is more bad optics and timing than anything else.
In large part because development is getting more and more expensive and game prices mostly have stagnated for decades (until semi-recently bumping up to 70 and now 80 USD).
Canceled.
They’ve made very clear that they’re reducing functionality, dropping products including their gaming companies, and raising prices across the board to somehow come up with billions for AI. They no longer care about their customers or employees, only this holy grail quest for money that will evaporate. Dump Microsoft.
Microsoft was never going to make gaming affordable. The entire goal of GP is like any subscription service, to get you hooked so they can increase the prices. Microsoft is not and never was a pro consumer company. And GamePass is Microsoft’s attempt at making a hardwareless console. It’s a BYOD walled garden. It’s bad for consumers and bad for developers and publishers. Consumers will own nothing and studios are beholden to MS gatekeepers. Some account manager basically decides how much the devs will be financially compensated before the game is even released, instead of letting the market decide. Remember those court documents which showed how much they under valued Baldur’s Gate 3. If you think the standard 30% store cut is outrageous GamePass is on another level of bad. Sure they are currently showering devs in cash, but once MS has a significant chunk of the market they are going to turn off that tap. We’ve seen it with Netflix and Spotify. Like even the most popular artists earn fractions of cents per user.
The very definition of enshittification:
Here is how 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. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two-sided market”, where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
but we’re trying to reinforce by adding more value to these plans as well."
Fortnite Crew and Ubisoft+ ClassicsSo if you don’t play Fortnite and aren’t interested in 15 different Assassin’s Creed titles, fuck you I guess
Imagine, if you will, the possibility of NOT increasing prices 50% to give us the “additional value” of shit we don’t want.
I was happy paying for games, but suddenly I’m extremely willing to get back into piracy. Fucking weird, right?
Apparently those titles are as or more valuable than half of the entire catalog, how can you not be excited‽
Especially for the companies who disappear because they were too greedy.
I’m trying to think of a single example and I’m struggling
EA just had to sell to avoid continuing their downward spiral
McDonald’s is the most clear cut example, although that’s ongoing
There’s been countless little companies that sent themselves into death spirals with a price hike, but when they’re big their remains are pounced on, or they experience a slow decline before collapsing to a failed pivot
Lol, but here’s one anyway. - Microsoft
While they might or might not have reasons to raise prices, those people who cancelled their subscriptions definitively had their reason.
Yeah, it’s too expensive.
Except your CEO the boardroom and the shareholders
So, if there had been no cancellations and their customers had just paid their bills without comment or criticism, they’d still have been telling us how terrible they felt about the whole thing?
Bovine Excrement.
