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So apologies for my voice, I’m a bit under the weather today, but we do have a major major story in terms of Microsoft making some big shake ups to Xbox Game Pass.”
“Now if you’ve been living under a rock you might not know what Xbox Game Pass is and if you don’t know what Xbox Game Pass is, it’s essentially your subscription service where you can get access to day one games, access to all games, all for a monthly price rather than paying for the individual game itself.”
“It is a massively popular way of buying games and it is one that consistently sees a good amount of revenue for Microsoft, however it seems that that revenue might not yet be enough for the company as Game Pass Ultimate is getting a price hike to £29.99 a month in US dollars or £22.99 a month in Great British Pounds.”
“That’s not just the only way though that you can have Game Pass because we now have Game Pass Essential and Game Pass Premium, these are the two new labels for Game Pass Core and Game Pass Standard.
Game Pass Essential is basically your sort of core membership, it’s about £9.99 a month dollars wise, it has access to 50 games, 50 plus games, it comes with unlimited cloud streaming, some in game benefits for stuff like Riot Games, online console multiplayer and it gives you some reward points as well.”
“Premium is a bit of a better deal but it doesn’t have the day one games that Xbox Game Pass Ultimate does and that’s really the main selling point of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate is that you don’t have to pay for buying a game on release, you can instead just pay the £29.99 and just have whatever you like, whether that’s Call of Duty, whether that’s Fallout, whether that’s anything else that comes out in that list, Call of Duty Obscure this year, Stalker 2 last year, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, these games that would otherwise cost you about £70 per pop can instead be enjoyed for much less of a price than that.”
“However as we look to the sort of pricing of Game Pass now that it is about $30 a month that means that over the course of a year you’re probably spending around about $360 on Game Pass per month, per year, which means that you would probably have to pay about 6 or 7 big games, new games, day one games for that ultimate price to be worth it, whereas it used to be with the old pricing system that you could really just play a couple of these big games.”
“So I think the Game Pass system is going to remain staunchly popular for people who enjoy it but I don’t think that this sort of strategy is going to, even though it adds, as Jonas writes here, a lot more content for people, so the rewards points is a big deal, in-game rewards are a big deal, other subscription services are included with this like Ubisoft Plus Classics, EA Access, things like that, but I don’t think that this is going to really still succeed in bringing someone over who hadn’t previously been interested in an Xbox Game Pass because the main thing is going to be that the price point is going to put them off.”
