A Theory As To Why Microsoft Stopped Its $1 Xbox Game Pass Deal


A month of Xbox Game Pass for $1 has been a staple of the program since launch, a way to get players on board by showing them the vast array of games, then convincing them to keep the subscription once the price gets upped on Ultimate to $14.99 a month after that.

Now, that era is over. Microsoft has officially confirmed that the $1 trial month deal is going away:

“We have stopped our previous introductory offer for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass and are evaluating different marketing promotions for new members in the future,” Xbox head of global communications Kari Perez told The Verge in a statement.

It’s a bit…abrupt to stop the $1 deal without a “different marketing promotion for new members” to replace it. This has naturally set off a period of console war flaming about how it’s a sign Game Pass is desperate for cash and wants all that money up front without the $1 trial in place.

I don’t necessarily read it that way, but I do see it as a changing sign of the times based on Microsoft’s upcoming catalogue.

What I think is happening here is tied to Microsoft’s pending slate of games, which is moving into Sony territory with big-budget, mostly single player/co-op games. We have Redfall being released in just over a month on May 2. We have Starfield being released on September 6, less than six months away.

My guess here is that Microsoft does not want a bunch of people signing up for the $1 Game Pass trial just for these games during their launch month, beating them, then cancelling the subscription. Both of these games are hugely high-profile releases for Microsoft’s biggest acquired studio so far (Bethesda, given that the Activision deal isn’t done yet), and if you’re going to sub to Game Pass for them, Microsoft wants that $15, not $1 with a pending cancellation on the way a few weeks later.

My guess is that Redfall, certainly, could be completed within a month, if not a week of hardcore play. Starfield, being a mainline Bethesda game, probably has a few hundred hours buried in it, if not thousands, like past Fallout and Elder Scrolls games, but exploration and multiple playthroughs aside, it is fundamentally a single player game you could beat in a month if you were looking to only spend a buck to play it on Xbox or PC.

This is the difference between Microsoft’s Game Pass philosophy and Sony’s “we’re almost never going to do big game launches within subscriptions” model. Microsoft already has to justify Game Pass’ offerings of new first party games for the monthly sub, but I imagine that gets a lot harder with a slate of upcoming releases that could be acquired and beaten within that $1 first month. Sony, meanwhile, now gets to sell millions of copies of its game at $70. That may not get them all the “consumer-friendly” praise that Microsoft gets for Game Pass, but it does get them…millions of dollars. 20 million Spider-Man and God of War sales last generation alone, to start with.

So, that’s my guess as to why this is happening, and why this is happening now. Microsoft is about to launch a bunch of somewhat fixed-length games and they want you to pay more than $1 to beat them. And we’ll see if Game Pass itself will keep its price the same, or if that’s destined to go up soon as well.

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