At the end of last year, Xbox hit us with a bombshell: it was hiking up the price of Game Pass. Not by a little bit, but by an absolute shitload. A colossal amount. Roughly 50%.
Well, now we have a little glimpse into how much damage that did. Xbox chief strategy officer Matthew Ball did a live interview with The Game Business today, and while the video isn’t up yet, people who were in the crowd have already been sharing parts of it, including one Geoff Keighley.
According to Keighley and others in the audience, Ball stated that Xbox lost “millions of subscribers” when they raised the price, although he didn’t provide anything more specific.
It’s not shocking news, but it’s still nice to get confirmation of what we already expected, right?
Xbox boss Asha Sharma also recently said something similar, stating that Xbox Game Pass went into an 8-month decline. However, she also said it had “now returned to growth and expanding revenue retention.”
That’s because one of Sharma’s earliest decisions when she stepped into the role of CEO of Xbox was to drop prices. They didn’t go back to what they were last year, but they were reduced by a good bit. Mostly because you no longer get new Call of Duty games straight away.
Xbox is in the midst of yet another series of sweeping changes. This time, Gears of War: E-Day and Clockwork Revolution have both been announced as Xbox exclusives, while other titles like Fable and Halo: Campaign Evolved are still coming to PS5 as well.
I’ll now go back to stalking Geoff Keighley. For any more interesting tidbits of news, obviously. No other reasons.
WGB 