Game Pass is $30 a Month Now and I Dont Know How to Feel About It
So Microsoft bumped Game Pass Ultimate to $30 a month back in October. They restructured everything – Essential at $10, Premium at $15, Ultimate at $30. Added Fortnite Crew which is supposedly worth $12 on its own. Call of Duty day one. All the big Xbox stuff.
On paper its incredible value if you actually play enough games. On paper.
But $30 a month is $360 a year. Thats like five or six full price games. And I dont own any of them. The second I stop paying they all go away. Every game Ive “played” through Game Pass I dont actually have. Thats been bothering me lately for some reason.
Black Ops 7 launched day one on Game Pass and flopped hard. Sales down 63% from Battlefield in Europe. Steam numbers way lower than last year. Some of that is the game being bad but some of that is also… why would anyone pay $70 when $30 gets you this plus hundreds of other games?
Microsoft knew this would happen. They did the math. They bought Activision for like 70 billion dollars partly to put CoD on Game Pass. The hit to individual sales is acceptable because theyre playing a different game now. Recurring revenue. Subscription numbers. Monthly active users.
I get the business logic. I just wonder what it does to how games get made long term.
Traditional game sales were simple right? Make good game, people buy it, money comes in, fund next game. Brutal sometimes but understandable. Game Pass changes what success looks like. Now its about engagement metrics. Hours played. Did your game drive new subscriptions. Did it prevent cancellations.
Those are different incentives. A game doesnt need to be great anymore it needs to keep people subscribed. And weve seen what engagement optimization does to games. Battle passes. Daily logins. FOMO mechanics. All the stuff designed to maximize time spent rather than enjoyment had.
Im not saying Game Pass inevitably leads there. But the incentive structure points that direction. And incentives matter more than intentions over time.
The irony is Game Pass lets me try stuff I would never buy. Just this month I played games that wouldnt have gotten my money otherwise. Thats real value. But I also rarely FINISH Game Pass games because theres no investment. They’re just. There. Available. Infinite. Making any individual game feel less meaningful.
I dont have answers. Im still subscribed. Im still playing. But the subscription revolution is here and I keep wondering where its actually taking us.
Maybe Im overthinking it. Maybe its just Netflix for games and thats fine. Maybe.
