Raise the price of your flagship subscription service by 50% and see what happens. Turns out, what happens is you lose millions of subscribers.
That's the blunt reality Microsoft is now sitting with after its October 2025 Game Pass price hike, which pushed Game Pass Ultimate from $19.99 to $29.99 per month. Matthew Ball, the games industry analyst who recently stepped into the role of Xbox chief strategy officer, confirmed during a Summer Game Fest interview that Game Pass shed "millions" of subscribers in the months following that increase. The number wasn't broken down further, but the framing made clear this wasn't a rounding error.
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The damage a single price increase can do
Here's the thing: a 50% price jump on a subscription service is a lot to ask of players at any time. Game Pass Ultimate going from $19.99 to $29.99 in one move gave subscribers a very easy decision to make, and millions of them made it. The value proposition that had made Game Pass one of Xbox's strongest selling points for years evaporated almost overnight.
The scale of those losses is what makes Ball's admission notable. Subscription churn is normal. Losing millions of subscribers in a matter of months is a structural problem.
The October 2025 price hike saw Game Pass Ultimate increase by 50%, from $19.99 to $29.99 per month. That single change is now confirmed to have cost Xbox millions of subscribers.
Xbox CEO Asha Sharma had already acknowledged the pricing was a mistake before Ball put a scale on it, publicly stating that the service needed a "better value equation." The speed with which she moved to reverse course suggests the internal subscriber data was even more alarming than the public reaction indicated.
What Microsoft did to stop the bleeding
The price rollback landed Game Pass Ultimate at $22.99 per month, still higher than the pre-hike price but considerably less painful than $29.99. The recovery wasn't free, though. As part of the adjustment, new Call of Duty titles will no longer land on Game Pass at launch. Instead, they'll be added roughly a year after release, a meaningful change for anyone who subscribed specifically to play new Call of Duty games day one.
The trade-off is a calculated one. Microsoft is betting that a lower monthly price retains more subscribers than day-one Call of Duty access attracts new ones. Sharma's own words in May backed that up, noting that acquisitions had grown and retention had improved following the price cut. Ball echoed that, describing the new pricing as "resonating" with players.
For those who want to stay on top of what's actually worth playing across Xbox and elsewhere, the game reviews at GAMES.GG break down the library beyond the subscription headlines.
Xbox's bigger picture problem
The Game Pass situation is one thread in a much larger knot. Ball's new role as chief strategy officer signals that Xbox is trying to get more serious about long-term planning, but the challenges are real. Seamus Blackley, one of the original architects of the Xbox console, had predicted Sharma's appointment was essentially a managed wind-down of the Xbox brand. He's since softened that take, and recent moves give him reason to.
Beyond the pricing fix, Xbox has signaled a return to console exclusives, walking back the multiplatform strategy that defined the Phil Spencer era. Whether that shift genuinely changes the competitive picture against PlayStation or just generates goodwill headlines is still an open question. The subscriber losses are recoverable if the content pipeline delivers. What most players miss in all the strategy talk is that subscriptions live and die on what's actually in the library on a given Tuesday.
The Call of Duty delay is the most visible cost of the price correction, and it's worth watching how that plays out over the next 12 months. If the games that do arrive at launch on Game Pass are strong enough, the day-one Call of Duty absence may not sting as much as it sounds. If the library feels thin, the $22.99 price point will face pressure all over again.
For a deeper look at what's actually worth your time across every platform right now, our gaming guides have you covered on what to play and how to play it well.
