r/gaming • u/wakelake111 • 3h ago
Xbox CCO Says Gamepass Lost “Millions Of Subscribers” After Increasing The Price By 50% Last Year
https://www.thegamer.com/xbox-game-pass-lost-millions-of-subscribers/7.6k
u/Fusshaman 3h ago
Who would have see it coming?
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u/Working_Complex8122 3h ago
everyone except people getting paid millions to do the thinking. Wish I could get paid to fail at my job and ruin companies. Just punt a baby out a window here and there and probably still do better than those guys.
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u/sukizka 3h ago
Truly don’t understand large companies.
“We need to cut costs, let’s fire these 1,000 workers. Great job nameless CEO, here’s a $10mil bonus!”
Like just hire me, I’ll do the same job as nameless CEO for half as much and keep everything the same and you’ll be saving way more money.
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u/hardy_83 3h ago
With their push for AI taking over everything, they seem unwilling to replace the most replaceable job with AI. The corporate CEO.
They'd save millions, if not tens or hundreds of millions a year not having a CEO.
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u/RonaldoNazario 3h ago
“You are a CEO. Copy the moves that the CEOs at other large similar companies do. Please do not use any em dashes”
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u/aiiye 2h ago
Explain in the same sentence why your division has new record profits but also you have to lay off 90% of workers to pay upper management bonuses due to “difficult market conditions”. Add tone-deaf and out of touch critiques suggesting you have never had to make decisions or compromises based on finances.
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u/RMAPOS 1h ago
My GPT struggles to take that request seriously
“While our division celebrates record profits that truly validate the strategic genius of upper management, we regretfully must lay off 90% of employees due to difficult market conditions, suggesting that although I’ve never personally had to make a financial compromise more serious than choosing between the platinum or diamond executive lunch package, I deeply empathize with the challenges our departing staff will face as they navigate the exciting opportunity of unemployment.”
Do I need to use a different version to become CEO or is this okay?
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u/RandomUser72 1h ago
You shouldn't "empathize" with the laid off employees, take a page from Epic and congratulate all the other companies that get to hire some amazing employees, and congratulate the employees on going on their next exciting level of their career with someone else.
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u/Explosive-Space-Mod 2h ago
There are legitimate cases where this can happen.
Do well previous year but future bookings = poor af means you can have a record year and then still need to lay off people.
Is it something that happens as often as these massive layoffs, also no.
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u/XChrisUnknownX 3h ago
AI does not think. It uses fancy math to guess the next word. The more people that understand this, the further we will be from a world where people are delegating their thinking to something that cannot think about or conceptualize the issues being described to it.
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u/ImportantCommentator 3h ago
Kind of like CEOs
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u/XChrisUnknownX 3h ago
I see the point you’re making and while I do see the similarity between AI and smooth talkers, I would prefer if they made me CEO and paid me a million dollars to make bad decisions so I must advocate against AI use for CEOs.
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u/XsNR 3h ago
Just replace all the CEOs with AIs, and put their salaries into a pot that can pay for otherwise tax based benefits. 2 problems solved in 1.
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u/JamesCoyle3 3h ago
I agree with you. But if we're going down the AI black hole, I want to make sure the CEOs are down there with us. I'll take great solace in everyone suffering the same fate.
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u/CndConnection 3h ago
In my home me and my roommate joke that these idiots are letting a rock do the thinking for them.
Saying "The AI said" is essentially saying "The magic rock said"
It's silicon all the way down baby.
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u/Smudded 1h ago
This isn't quite true anymore. There are other kinds of models involved that change what's actually happening. It's still not quite human intelligence, but it's different than simply predicting the next character/word in all cases.
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u/Swayze_train_exp 3h ago
Isn't it dumbfounding that so many companies are firing people left and right who work and make the product we use, while CEO'S who's salary have skyrocketed and have increased 281 times more then the average worker in their company. I read an article about the company Teradata who announced they are not giving out any raises this year, but instead investing all that money into AI. Fuck these morons and their decisions.
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u/Four_beastlings 3h ago
When we are all jobless because we've been replaced by AI, who's going to buy their products?
Seriously, do companies not realise that they need CONSUMERS, and for that people need to have jobs and be paid?
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u/Urdothor 2h ago
The probably hope that they end up being the one that doesnt have to hire the consumers to be employees, so they can be top of the food chain so to speak; all the money coming in, none coming out ro pay employees.
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u/Swayze_train_exp 2h ago
Oh I know we are in a recession but eventually the US will get so bad it will be like the housing market of 2008, only the rich will come out on top. We should take a playbook from Franklin D. Roosevelt who put into place The Revenue Act of 1935. We need to have that permanent "79% tax rate on annual incomes over $5 million" yeah let's have some of that please.
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u/SinibusUSG 3h ago
It all ties back to Reagan destroying regulation of markets. Companies have become so aggressively beholden to shareholder interests that they will do just about anything to get immediate stock bumps regardless of sustainability. Then the CEO parachutes out as the company or division starts to collapse and is purchased by private equity to cannibalize before its ultimate death.
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u/Number6isNo1 2h ago
Don't let The Chicago School of Economics and Milton Friedman off the hook. They are the ones that made "the only purpose of a corporation is to increase shareholder value" and "all government regulation is bad" dogmatic for generations of MBAs starting in the 70s. So being a good corporate neighbor can lead to shareholder lawsuits for breach of fiduciary duty, but spending billions to influence politicians and eliminate regulations is welcomed. The 70s-80s set the US up for the corporate shitshows of the 2020s.
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u/I_make_things 1h ago
It goes back way further:
The legal decision most famous for establishing that companies are beholden to their stockholders is Dodge v. Ford Motor Co. (1919)
In its opinion, the court established the concept of "shareholder primacy" by stating that a business corporation is organized and carried on primarily for the profit of the stockholders
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u/FauxReal 2h ago
The golden parachute part is pretty amazing. What even keeps CEOs (the C-Suite and board members in general) accountable for actual business success and the company's responsibilities to customers and employees?
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u/anthrax9999 2h ago
Responsibility to customers and employees? 😂 That's the beauty of the current system and exactly why they made it this way: NOTHING!
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u/Certified_GSD 3h ago
"We need to attract talent so we HAVE to pay them these insane bonuses and salaries and stock options." Really? I can make bad decisions too. I am also qualified.
Whales have poisoned corporate executive thinking. They think having 25% of the market paying high fees is better than capturing 90% of the market at a reasonable cost.
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u/DiscoQuebrado 3h ago
and I mean... the whales aren't going to stick around if there's no plankton to uh.. whale on... so, well... there it is.
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u/tossitlikeadwarf 3h ago
Yeah but you won't have that ONE quarter where the numbers go up because of all the firing which increases stock prices. So you'd be considered a bad CEO and then they'd fire you and you'd only get your $100 mil golden parachute.
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u/drewster23 3h ago
And not the company has lost even more in billions in market share due to lack of investor confidence and now all shareholders are pissed.
"Great success"
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u/TornInfinity 3h ago
The problem is made it illegal for public companies to not make every effort to increase revenue every quarter. Every public company has a feduciary duty to their shareholders and if the CEO decides to just keep things the same and make the same amount of revenue without making any effort to increase it quarterly, they will be voted out by the board and can be sued. I learned about this in my business law class taught by a former US attorney. It kinda blew my mind but it explained why companies behave this way rather than just being happy with the billions they make every year, so they make boneheaded decisions.
A company I worked for had about 150 employees. They fired over a third of them and I heard the CEO say, in a meeting, that it was a good decision because revenues stayed the same for the first month, so obviously those employees weren't necessary. It was the Republican mindset, that if they pass a terrible policy, but don't see the negative effects of it for a couple years, then it obviously wasn't their fault. Anyway, that company I worked for no longer exists because it turned out that those employees were necessary for maintaining our revenue streams, so the company rapidly went bankrupt. It was really stupid and we tried to warn the CEO, but he didn't believe us. Morons are making these decisions and it is destroying companies and, therefore, destroying lives, all in the name of quick profits to appease the shareholders.
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u/oddministrator 2h ago
Except not actually.
The CEO of a publicly traded company can still make decisions that are better for the consumer than the corporation's bottom line if they just say it's for "good will."
Brought to you by someone who just spent $1.50 on an (at least) 1/4 pound all-beef hot dog and 20oz soda (with refill) for lunch.
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u/UprootedGrunt 3h ago
I've often considered marketing myself as a "scapegoat CEO". Feel like your company is going to go through hard times? I'll take the job for two years at 25% of your normal CEO's salary/golden parachute and take all the blame.
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u/Radthereptile 3h ago
The secret issue with business, innovation gets you fired, status quo can be explained away.
If you have a funds problem and you say “raise the price” that’s what business says to do. If it fails you probably survive this because “it was the business move. And raising prices usually works.” They’ll say it was an error and leave it there.
But if you suggest something innovative, say cutting the price to draw more people in, and that fails now you’re getting fired. Everyone will go “Hey this thing nobody does failed. And it was that guys idea. He’s gone.”
A lot of times business executives pick a solution they know will fail over an innovative risk because they know they won’t personally be blamed for the failure while the risk failing will fall directly on them. Another issue with the system sadly.
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u/Grotti-ltalie 3h ago
Almost like there are repercussions from shooting yourself in the foot
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u/KurnolSanders 3h ago
Honestly I'm surprised. I'm glad. But given how well the TV world seems to be doing increasing the price AND increasing or maintaining subscription count, it's refreshing and good to see it back fire like this.
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u/lonnie123 3h ago
There isn’t a viable alternative to streaming services like there is in the game space
I can’t wait for SteamFlix to sell me stranger things or game of thrones for $5 in 2-4 years and just cancel my membership and wait for that happen.
They are in a tough spot… lots of competition, Sony is eating their lunch because of exclusives, and by and large gamers didn’t reward them for their no-exclusivity policy. I personally didn’t think it was that egregious, especially if you play the day 1 AAA launches, but it was received terribly. I’ll resub at a certain point once I’ve cleared the games I bought, I still think it’s a great value
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u/Gina_the_Alien 2h ago
I can see where you’re coming from, but I’m not surprised at all. I’ve commented this before, but Xbox Live for me went from a no brainer auto subscribe to an instant cancellation the moment the price increase was announced - literally - as soon as I read the announcement I logged on and cancelled. Turns out for me $20 was pretty much the most I was willing to pay per month.
Anyway, I am keenly aware that I’m a *very* average person and also a very average gamer. I knew when they lost me that they would be losing A LOT of people.
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u/XsNR 3h ago
I think the key is that they use the McD's model, of having a shit model, a medium model that nobody buys, and a small upgrade to the max level. You can't just go increasing the cost of the same product by 50% for no major benefit.
If Xbox had a shit model that forced ads into your gameplay every 15 minutes, a medium model without cod that was still overpriced, and a top model for a minor upgrade with cod, they'd probably have been fine.
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u/Radthereptile 3h ago
Literally me. Went from “wow what a great deal” to “F this I’m getting PS plus extra.”
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u/Heisenberglund D20 3h ago
I said fuck consoles entirely and got a steam deck. No paid online services for it at all.
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u/metalyger 3h ago
It was also annoying, because their justification for adding another $10 a month to ultimate was because they added Ubisoft+, which previously was a seperate subscription. Nobody was asking for this to be integrated. Of course they wouldn't have the options like online play, day one exclusives, and do you want to pay extra for EA and Ubisoft games from at least a year ago? It's just put it all in ultimate and charge $30 a month for the privilege. At least they did cut down the price enough after the disastrous decision.
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u/dirtybird971 3h ago
not to mention that EA and Ubisoft are both owned or partially owned by the Saudi's and Jared Kushner. FUCK THEM ALL!! Down with the billionaire class.
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u/najera23 3h ago
That is a natural move within venture capital and big corporations.
They usually estimate that around 5% of their clients will drop from price increase and will be able to save about 50% of those with promotions.
Now those price increases are usually 10 to 15%
Remember kids, corporations are not your friends, they are not here to make you happy. They are here to squeeze as much money as they can out of your pockets.
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u/OliverCrooks 3h ago
I'm at a point in my life that if I can fuck over a corporation, I will do it. They don't give a shit about their customers.
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u/allanbc 3h ago
With a 50% price increase, you can lose millions of customers and still have it be the right move. You just need enough people who stay. I don't know if they have that, but probably none of us do.
Note that I'm not a fan of price increases.
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u/IlliterateJedi 2h ago
The article mentioned 35M-38M subscribers, so if they lost 5M and made 50% more off the remaining 30M-33M, they came out just fine.
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u/doglywolf 3h ago
some spreadsheet with data analystics from bad sources that said enough people would stay at the full price that it would make up for people that left. They were Wrong...They were very wrong
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u/theLastZebranky 2h ago edited 2h ago
They weren't wrong. They'd have to lose over 33% (>11 million) of their subscribers for their income not to go up as a result of this decision, not to mention the drop in costs that comes with having to provide the service to fewer people.
One thing that separates business majors from most reddit gamers is that they can do math.
35M * $20 = $700M/mo.
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u/doglywolf 2h ago
The issue is they would not be rolling it back if it were not much worse . Yes they lost Millions of users completely but might otherwise still be ahead of the game financially - but how many users did they not lose that dropped down tiers as well? i will be the metrics on that are significantly worse
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u/ScoobyMaroon 3h ago
I did the thing a few years ago where I bought several years of Gold and then upgraded it all to Gamepass Ultimate for basically nothing extra. That just ran out and I never even considered resubscribing. It was nice to have from time to time but I wouldn't say I used it enough to justify even the discounted price I got it at.
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u/matva55 PC 3h ago
Yeah, this is my whole issue with gamepass tbh. It’s a really awesome service that I barely used enough to justify the price
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u/dksdragon43 1h ago
Subscriptions in general are just so fomo so often. Like the kindle one is $12/month CAD, which is great for a crazy amount of books, but pretty meh when you realize most of them are books you could buy for $3. I was really struggling feeling like I had to read 5+ books a month for it to be "worth it". I cancelled and feel much better about reading again.
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u/--redacted-- 3h ago
They lost me as soon as they announced the increase. 50% cost increase with a 0% increase in content I wanted to play, fuck off Microsoft.
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u/GettinShlibbyWithIt 2h ago
That change in content is negative, if anything. The absorption of Activision was heavily marketed with the perk of having CoD on Gamepass day one every year, and now they've backtracked even that.
The only reason I even touched that slop is because it was included in my subscription, which I promptly downgraded to Essential.
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u/siccoblue 2h ago
Yeah, it's the first subscription of something I regularly used and enjoyed I cancelled in years. I would rather just buy a game every month or two depending on the price. They usually take me about that long to finish anyways.
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u/Rhetorical-Warrior 47m ago
Same for me. I cancelled my subscription about 3 months ago and just bought kcd2. It's the only thing I have played since.
If gamepass was cheaper I would have kept the subscription and just played it on there. But with the price increase, it's just cheaper to buy those type of games
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u/Realsan 2h ago
Removing CoD from Gamepass was how they were able to make the math work to reduce the price of Gamepass today.
It's a better strategy. My gut instinct is the vast majority of CoD players have never touched any other gamepass games, aside from maybe sports.
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u/GuardiaNIsBae 1h ago
PC gamers don’t understand this for some reason, but there is an insane amount of console gamers that literally just buy the new CoD or NBA or FIFA every year and never play anything else until the next iteration comes out after a year. Xbox was “losing” money then because instead of paying $100 for the new CoD they’d just gamepass it for the year at $15 a month (or until they got bored of it after 4 months)
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u/pathofdumbasses 1h ago
Removing CoD from Gamepass was how they were able to make the math work to reduce the price of Gamepass today.
Gamepass before COD: $20
Gamepass during COD: $30
Gamepass after removing COD: $23
Gamepass subscribers: "THANK YOU MS FOR LOWERING GAMEPASS PRICE!!!"
Rofl. They still increased prices by 15%, even after removing COD. People who still subscribe to gamepass are fucking dumb.
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u/RipCityGGG 3h ago
Also worse than that for me, game was was enjoying disappearing overtime is a bad feeling
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u/Upbeat-Armadillo1756 2h ago
They lost me permanently.
I was on and off before the hike but after it I won’t be back. I like buying my games.
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u/zenzony 3h ago
I don't understand why they raise the price instead of lowering it so many more buys the product and it becomes more popular so they make more money that way instead of making more money off of the fewer people who stays and keep paying
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u/LizzieMiles 3h ago
Banking on people just accepting it or not realizing they are still subbed mainly
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u/Ok_Challenge_9102 2h ago
Unless they lost more than 33% of their subscriber base they'll still have come out ahead with the 50% price rise (and using less compute resource).
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u/CannedMatter 2h ago
I don't understand why they raise the price instead of lowering it so many more buys the product
Because subscribers come with overhead costs. 50% more subscribers means 50% more customer service expenses, 50% more bandwidth expenses, and 50% more compensation to developers whose games are on Gamepass. Selling fewer subscriptions at a higher profit margin is absolutely a plausible business strategy.
The tricky part is that you can't ever be 100% sure how many sales you'll lose at a higher price. On the other hand, you can also never tell how many you'll gain by selling at a cheaper price.
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u/Initiatedspoon 2h ago
Really think about this
If it was this easy, every company would do it.
Why does Netflix charge $10 a month, why not charge $5 and get way more subscribers?
Profit maximisation.
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u/Ecstatic-Ad4093 3h ago
I mean, yeah. A 50 % price increase is pretty fucking steep. Wonder if their analytics department had a mental breakdown beforehand or if they even ran any predictions.
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u/Villag3Idiot 3h ago
Either full of Yes Men or they did warn the company but the higher ups ignored them.
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u/RockyBass 3h ago
The later is how it usually happens. We tell them what will happen, they agree, but then they talk to each other behind closed doors and convince themselves otherwise.
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u/mucho-gusto 2h ago
Just watched a video yesterday on a Korean shopping mall collapse in 1994. The manager and engineers told the suits they had to shut down immediately, the chairman was like nah we have a lot of customers. Somehow the guy only got 8 years of jail for over 500 deaths! Capitalism is a societal cancer
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u/Slaughts90 2h ago
Plus their fiduciary responsibilities are to the shareholders, not the customers who bore that price hike and don't have no stocks. They're only thinking to the next fiscal quarter and if they can get a boost in operating profit at the next shareholder meeting, they'll do it despite everyone complaining.
If there's enough backlash that it actually hits their stock prices, and is traceable to it (like how lootboxes hit EA so bad in 2017/18), then they might backpedal.
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u/NickiChaos 3h ago
Higher ups have a tendency to cherry pick data that confirms bias rather than confirm an outcome.
As in “Data shows that if you increase the price of something, you could make more money from it.”
But leave out the part “However, increasing the price by too steep a margin will lead many people to no longer pay for it and could cause irreparable reputational damage”
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u/Seigmoraig 3h ago
Probably asked Copilot to do those predictions and they were totally blindsided when it was completely wrong and people left in droves
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u/Falsus 2h ago
Probably did a quarry like "If we increase the price by 50% will we make that much more money then?"
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u/carnage123 2h ago
If we increase by 50% will we make more money from the people staying than the amount of people we will lose
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u/slapsheavy 3h ago edited 2h ago
I think it's safe to assume a department in a Trillion dollar company did scenario analysis before rolling this out.
Losing subscribers is the expectation with this move, millions when you have a subscriber base of 34 mill. They would need to lose more than 33% of suscribers to fall below the revenue levels of the prior pricing.
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u/Villag3Idiot 3h ago
Seeing as how they ended up lowering prices, they must have lost more than 33% of their subscribers.
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u/ggallardo02 3h ago
They had 34 mil subscribers. So losing event 10 mil is still a net gain. So I'd say yeah, they ran predictions, met them, and made more money.
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u/Ecstatic-Ad4093 2h ago
I would agree if they did not end up lowering the price again, stated that they want to go for 100(not 100% confident on that number tbh) Mil. subcribers later down the line and already shitting the bed with Xbox. But still could be the case that the saw a revenue increase and went through with it, eventhough it clearly did cost them.
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u/BillyBean11111 2h ago
well, if they had 40 million subs before, and lost "millions" down to lets say 30 million. They are still making way more money doing this, and now you have 10 million former users that may resub in the future once they realize they miss it.
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u/zoobrix 3h ago
It wouldn't have mattered if at a meeting concerned employees presented how the price rise would destroy the entire Xbox brand with the projections to back it up based on modeling from other services making such a big jump cost over such a short time. The C suite are the ones in charge and if they have a pet project or idea they're going to get it through no matter how much of a disaster everyone in the trenches could tell them it would be.
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u/ICC-u 3h ago
I wonder if they just did the maths, increase the price by 50%, losing even a third of customers would still be break even. Then, every new customer generates an extra 50% revenue. What are they going to do, buy a different subscription!
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u/rcanhestro 1h ago
it's basic math for them.
a 50% increase means that they could afford to lose 30% of their subscribers, and still have a net profit from that move.
100 people paying 10$ = 1000$ total revenue.
70 people paying 15$ = 1050$ total revenue (and less expenses).
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u/wakelake111 3h ago
Their last reported numbers was 34 mil subscribers in 2024, so its likely they actually have much fewer subscribers than 2 years ago rather than growing
At the start of this console generation their target was 100 million subscribers by 2030
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u/RumpDoctor 3h ago
I think 34 was counting basic gold subs, which were rebranded to game pass.
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u/spacedude2000 3h ago
One of my buddies made the 400 iq move to buy several years worth of Xbox live gold subscriptions right after game pass was unveiled. He knew they would force this shit down our throats. We thought he was crazy at the time but now we're all kicking ourselves that we didn't do the same.
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u/jdmackes 3h ago
That's what I did, bought three years, converted it to gamepass ultimate. Then at the end of those three years, I did the same thing again. Got 6 years of gamepass for like maybe 200 bucks (I was buying xbox live gold online from wherever had it cheapest at the time). Now I just use my Microsoft points to pay for it.
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u/MapleWatch 2h ago
I did the conversion thing a few times, but MS kept nerfing the discount rate.
Last time my GP ran out I just said screw it and bought the games I wanted to play instead, it'll be significantly cheaper in the long run.
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u/RobCoPKC 3h ago
Many people did this, me included. I pretty much didn't pay anything except time by using Microsoft Rewards to purchase Xbox Live Gold for 3 years and converting it for 1 € to Game Pass Ultimate. And I did this twice so 6 years basically for free.
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u/summerofrain 3h ago
They will never reach that number because there aren’t 100 million people in the world interested enough in a netflix type service for videogames.
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u/Dark-Lord-Bleh 3h ago
Disagree. The original service was nice and the price was worth it. The issue is that they attached CoD to it like morons and then tried to compensate CoD not making enough by rising it.
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u/jntjr2005 3h ago
Well that and the fact CoD is getting worse with every release, this shit does NOT need to release yearly.
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u/calmdownmyguy 3h ago
Yeah, I don't know why it bothered me so much but I dropped the last cod after 15 minutes and never played it again. Something about the robot operators and color scheme just didn't click for me.
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u/jntjr2005 3h ago
Bro i can't fucking stand having to re-level 100 god dam guns a year too on top of the whiplash of every game being wildly different, we get shit like WW2 and then robots in space and shit like pick a lane
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u/nakedpicturesyo 3h ago
Lol in this capitalistic society even the video games are stressing people out. Jesus fucking christ, we all just want that sweet tiger crimson camo to last on our favorite gun but times are tough.
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u/Larcye 1h ago
Even back in the OG days have 2 different devs was already a whiplash. How many developers are in the cookie jar now??
Honestly just go back to one game every 3 years. One development Studio.
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u/Cluelesswolfkin 3h ago
Idk man i havent touched COD since Black Ops 3? I believe, learned as kid -> teenager -->adult COD is like madden or fifa but with more work put into it
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u/Head_Haunter 3h ago
Their original service got massive, massive numbers bumps from all those $1 per month for first 3 month coupons they gave out. One of my best friends was a regional marketing director for monster and gave us all like a dozen codes each for a while. That was my original introduction to gamepass and it was fantastic, especially for $1. After my friend quit monster and subsequently xbox stopped those deals, i switched to their monthly sub model for like half a year and then cut it completely when they bumped they price.
There is absolutely no world where they would get 100m subs without quite literally giving it away.
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u/Diddlemyloins 3h ago
I don’t even want major games like that on gamepass. Gamepass works for games I’m interested in but wouldn’t pay full cost for. Major system sellers simply don’t make sense on gamepass.
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u/Sam-Gunn 3h ago
I had the EA one for a while. For under $100 I could play at least 3 AAA(ish) titles at launch each year and a bunch of smaller titles. Not amazing, but not terrible. A lot of their older stuff was on there. I spent many hours playing the earlier Command & Conquer games.
I moved to Gamepass because it was supposed to include EA and the EA subscription I had was getting more and more sparse. I thought I was expanding my access for not too much more (before the price hike). Well turns out they only have the basic version of EA access, so I ended up losing out. Then they hiked the price. So I cancelled Gamepass, and didn't go back to EA.
So they all lost out, and I'm not buying any of those games at launch. With 150+ games in my backlog, I can wait until they're severely discounted.
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u/Suicune92 3h ago
Not at the price they are asking for it. If it was $10 and available on PC, PlayStation, and Switch alongside Xbox, I bet they could reach that number. Having it only on Xbox and PC and at the price, there is no way
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u/ExtremePrivilege 3h ago
Also disagree. A $15/month sub to play all of these $70-$90 new titles is a great deal. I can play an entire years worth of gaming for the cost of three new games? Outrageous value.
The value increases if you don’t sub full year. New $70 game launched and it’s on GamePass? Pay $15 and beat it. Just saved yourself $55.
In this era of all-digital it’s not like most people hate equity in their games anyway. The days of buying a $60 game, beat it, and selling it on Marketplace for $50 are largely over. Almost 94% of game sales in 2025 were digital.
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u/amalgam_reynolds 2h ago
As long as they lost less than a third of their subscribers, increasing the cost 50% was a net win. So when he says they lost "millions" of subscribers, I doubt he means they lost as many as 12 million.
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u/AustraliaOutback 3h ago
This is what happens when folks vote with their wallets.
I mean people can barely affoard basic necessities yet these megacorpos expect us to pay hand and foot for the same basic service.
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u/Moving4Motion 3h ago
All to make even more fucking money. It's never enough.
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u/AustraliaOutback 3h ago
Welcome to late stage capitalism where green arrow must go up every quarterly earnings call, otherwise the whole the system collapses.
Or so they tell us.
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u/Edythir 2h ago
It's worse than that. They are legally required to make the line go up. If shareholders feel like the company intentionally took steps which resulted in the stock price being lower than it could have bin, they have rights to sue.
After the healthcare CEO got a taste of karma, a few healthcare companies started to make changes. UnitedHealthcare got sued by their shareholders because of this. Because shareholders believed that changes would lead to a reduction in stockprice.
Since Ford Motors v Dodge, companies have a legal responsibility to think of shareholders above all. In my opinion, it is second to only Citizens United when it comes to the amount of damage done to American policies.
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u/KodaBeers PC 3h ago
Ive been trying to explain this to everyone about everything... they understand one language and it's money. Vehicles, streaming services, games, cell phones, etc.. People complain how expensive they are then buy it anyways!
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u/BigLan2 3h ago
I guess I'm one in millions
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u/kylec00per 3h ago
Same here, and the worst part is at least in my case, that it completely killed gaming for me. I haven't even touched mt Xbox in over a year and i was an avid gamer beforehand, and there were other factors that contributed but the price hike was the biggest nail for me. On top of that, they didnt get the word out good enough that they reduced prices again, because I actually juat found out this weekend when talking to a group of friends that I use to game with.
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u/pareech Xbox 3h ago
I'm one of those millions who dropped it after the last price hike, after being a subscriber to Xbox Live Gold and then gamepass ultimate for almost 25 years. Even with the lastest price drop, I'm still not going back.
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u/W0nderwharfwonderdog 2h ago
No reason to, it’s not the price it was in even 2022. I have receipts, I was paying $15 a month and I dropped it when they really tried to charge me over $20 for something I barely use. They don’t have enough content on there to justify it. It’s not like we don’t have the receipts of what we used to pay… the price drop can kiss my ass, it’s not even close to what it used to be and I don’t play on my Xbox anymore. It’s not worth it. I’ve switched to PC now
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u/Gina_the_Alien 2h ago
The price increase is what made me realize I don’t need gamepass or Xbox live at all. I was like you, subscribed for decades and was on auto subscription. It was a no brainer for me; I didn’t even think about it. They went from making $240/year from me to $0 instantly.
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u/AgtNulNulAgtVyf 2h ago
Got an Xbox because of Game Pass when it launched and stayed subbed until the increase. I'll be buying a PS6 when that launches, they lost any interest I had in the platform this point.
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u/GatorCentral 3h ago
They must have had to know they were going to lose subscribers, but I don’t think they thought it would be THAT many. Turns out, a room full of executives don’t know or care what the 99% wants
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u/DrAstralis 2h ago
I have to wonder if its because they're already all so wealthy that they didn't notice the 2008 crash or how bad things got during covid. To them nothing really changed. They can still afford multiple homes, any food they want, multiple vacations, healthcare. The idea that people might be out of money never even crossed their minds as part of the equation.
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u/GatorCentral 2h ago
I’m leaning more and more towards the side of, they know and they don’t care
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u/JoeHatesFanFiction 2h ago
Oh agreed.they definitely accounted for losing some and some others down grading. They badly overestimated how much people valued and needed their product and paid for it
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u/Front_Machine6560 3h ago
It’s almost like people didn’t want to subsidize Fortnite crew and Ubisoft plus as failing companies
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u/Joustiin76 3h ago
Yeah raising prices by a significant margin without doing anything differently tends to have that affect.
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u/Kyr-Shara Android 3h ago edited 3h ago
it wasn't just price increase they razed microsoft rewards to the ground. i used to have gamepass free each month
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u/IceBlue 3h ago
They dropped the price but it’s still higher than before and people are acting like they did right by us. No thanks.
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u/TheSaintRobbie 3h ago
I lowered mine to the lowest tier. I just need online and I'm good. Don't need ultimate anymore
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u/mucho-gusto 2h ago
It's absolutely horse shit we have to pay for online. I cancelled both Xbox and PlayStation online and only play f2p titles online or, get them on my steam deck if they can run it. Sad to not play Helldivers 2 anymore but it's not worth 100+ a year
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u/KodaBeers PC 3h ago
Listen, we've heard your complaints! We are lowering the price of gamepass! We learned from our mistakes...... next time we will raise the price in 3 small increments so it's harder to notice.
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u/Bownaldo 3h ago
They probably have a model with some formula that can calculate what the optimal pricing is to maximize revenue, so even if they have lost on the number of subscribers the total revenue may still be higher than before.
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u/parkwayy 2h ago
Except... they realized they fucked up and dropped the price slightly.
So, they missed the mark bad the first time.
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u/Jellozz 3h ago
At $30 a month I think even a lot of diehards realized that it'd just be cheaper to unsub and take that money and just buy games on sale. $360 a year is plenty to game on if you're playing older games.
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u/Villag3Idiot 3h ago
If they weren't so obviously greedy and just raised it by like 10% a year, a good chunk of the subscribers would have just complained but kept the sub.
But thank goodness that they were so inept they failed at even the boiling frog technique.
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u/BitingArtist 3h ago
They still haven't solved the DLC problem. Buy gamepass, play game. DLC comes out, buy gamepass and buy DLC for a game you don't own? What?
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u/R0binSage 3h ago
What are the chances they drop the price to get those subscribers back? Probably 0%.
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u/AgitatedStranger9698 3h ago
ROI is way harder for subscription games when 90% is indie shovelware.
5% is the game I want largely made by Microsoft.
2% is Indie gems.
Remaining 3% is a combo of a bonus free 2 play loot box, free 2 play with a dlc, or a solid indie game but with subscription or dlc for the full item.
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u/MapleWatch 2h ago
Ya, I did the math and decided to just buy the games that my kids and I actually play.
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u/jakeyninja 3h ago
You also lost your goodwill with those people! The damages for this go far beyond the subscription losses
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u/SpankThuMonkey 3h ago
I’m one of them.
Owned gamepass for years. Immediately cancelled on the price hike.
I won’t sign up again unless they drop it below the pre-price hike cost. Which they’ll never do.
Next console gen update i’ll buy a playstation.
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u/KAKYBAC 2h ago
Well done everyone for voting with their wallet.
Only way to send a message to millionaires is to diminish their capitalism.
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u/jmalham12 3h ago
I’m a degenerate who can find a way to justify almost ANY video game purchase. I could no longer come close to justifying Gamepass after the increase.
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u/just_some_sasquatch 3h ago
The only time gamepass was ever worth it was when you could get 3 years of it pre-paid for about $150. I think 2021 was the last year that was possible.
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u/Mafik326 3h ago
Someone show them a supply and demand graph.
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u/theonegunslinger 3h ago
Some one did, some one else showed them increased profits unless they lost 33% of subscribers, which seems unlikely based on this news
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u/CatManDeke 3h ago edited 3h ago
It's still not a great deal. I’d still rather OWN my games.
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u/bugmush 3h ago
The new person in charge seems to actually know what she's doing though. One of the first things she did was lower the price of game pass (ultimate down to $23 instead of $30, although it used to be $19.99), so that's good at least. Previous leadership was awful.
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u/Beardopus 2h ago
Making an unpopular move right before old leadership exits, blaming it on them, and then under-correcting to regain goodwill while still fucking everybody a little harder is pretty standard operating procedure for most corpos.
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u/drockalexander 3h ago
Yeah, we r not stupid lol and every service is doing the same. So no, people aren’t just gonna go along with it
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u/slayermcb 3h ago
If I hadn't already paid for a year at that point I wouldn't have renewed. I switched to monthly last month after they dropped the price a little and my yearly sub ran out. still trying to figure out if it's worth it.
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u/Gradedcaboose 3h ago
I can say for certain that I canceled my ultimate gamepass that I’ve consistently had since the moment ultimate gamepass became a thing within the hour the price hike was announced. I will never keep a consistent sub again.
It’s going to be month only basis and only for specific titles like this new gears.
I have always kept my gamepass even when I fully pivoted to PC back in 2020 because even at $20 a month it was worth it even if I only played my Xbox once in a blue moon to play some split screen games with a friend.
They burnt me forever on the brand, if it’s not on steam I won’t be playing it
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u/Zasa789 3h ago
I know a group of guys that are hardcore xbox owners. They’ve been owners since OG xbox and after the 360 generation theybought every gen and the even the mid generation upgrade models all the way to series X. These guys were very anti PS/PC, xbox for life POV, stereotypical Cosole wars flamers.
Shortly aftet these price hikes were announced all of them were taking about unsubscribing from game pass completely or using the home xbox sharing functionality so they only need one sub for 2 people. Some even flat out looking to getting a PCs instead of buying the gen console.
When moves by xbox/microslop got the hardcore consumers base turning against you know you fucked up beyond recovery.
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u/benbreve 3h ago
They really didnt understand how fragile their standing was with the $20/month people. SO MANY of us were already on the fence. Literal no-brainer. How many just outright cancelled vs dropping to basic tier because of this?
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u/Dark-Lord-Bleh 3h ago
Yeah no shit. I dropped it hard after that.