Microsoft lowers Game Pass prices, drops Call of Duty from day-one offerings
A savings of $84/year, offset by the delayed offering of a $70 annually-released game.
Microsoft’s subscription gaming service is getting its first major price drop, just six months after getting its biggest price increase.
That’s in part to a major change to what Microsoft is promising Game Pass subscribers.
As of today, Microsoft’s Game Pass Ultimate–the top tier of its subscription service–will cost $22.99/month, down from $29.99/month.
PC Game Pass, the version not for Xbox consoles, is dropping from $16.49/month to $13.99/month.
The company described this as a global change, with pricing varying by region. The new price kicks in at the start of existing customers’ next billing cycle.
Microsoft also announced that, beginning this year, new Call of Duty games, which tend to launch annually in October or November, will no longer launch into Game Pass. Instead, they’ll be added to Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass the following holiday season.
These changes follow the Verge’s report last week that the new head of Xbox, Asha Sharma, told employees that Game Pass “has become too expensive.”
Announcing the new plans today, Sharma wrote: “We’ll keep learning and evolving Game Pass to better match what matters to players.”
Microsoft has not released subscriber counts for Game Pass since early 2024, when it said all tiers of the service had a combined 34 million subscribers.
Today’s price change effectively alters the annual cost of Game Pass Ultimate for Xbox users from $360/year to $276/year. That’s a savings of $84. But that comes with Microsoft dropping a new $70 game from the service until it’s added a year after release.
Microsoft did not provide any detailed explanation for a change that, from the outside, appears to be an assessment by Sharma and team that the price of Game Pass needed to justify the inclusion of Call of Duty launching into the service was simply too much for its customers to bear. That’s certainly true for those Game Pass Ultimate subscribers who weren’t interested in Call of Duty or planned to purchase the series from PlayStation or on PC via Steam instead.
Two key timelines - Game Pass prices and Microsoft’s Activision plans
The new prices and Call of Duty switch represent a major twist in the saga of Microsoft’s $69 billion purchase of Activision Blizzard.
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