It’s easy to forget at this stage of the generation, but Sony was under intense pressure to create a rival to Xbox Game Pass when the PS5 released.
Many felt that Microsoft, with an open cheque book and The Best Deal in Gaming™, was going to eat its lunch. But the Japanese giant remained steadfast: it always said the economics don’t make sense.
Countless commentators argued at the time that Redmond was using a tried-and-trusted loss-leader model: hook players with impossible prices and then squeeze them for all they’re worth. We know from internal documents that it at one point expected 100 million subscribers.
But the Team in Green constantly rebutted the criticism, telling its uncritical community that the service was totally sustainable. There was a point where it claimed Xbox Game Pass actually increased full-price sales; possible in some instances of indie games gaining unprecedented exposure, but certainly not true for tentpole franchises.
Late last year the company dramatically increased the price of Game Pass Ultimate up from $19.99 to $29.99 per month, a frankly dizzying sum which no doubt led to a spate of cancellations – outside of those signed up for years to come on $1 deals during the service’s aggressive heyday.
But after internal memos conspicuously “leaked” last week, with new CEO Asha Sharma saying the service had gotten too expensive, the price of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate has now reduced to $22.99.
What’s interesting here is that it’s still technically an increase on the $19.99 number from last year, but it comes at the cost of Call of Duty.
It’s interesting to see perception on the first-person shooter so suddenly change in enthusiast circles; this series’ inclusion, touted as a reason at the time to support Xbox’s near-$70 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard, apparently is now surplus to requirements. The $7 monthly saving means more.
We know that Microsoft was taking a bath on Call of Duty, with estimates suggesting the platform holder lost close to $300 million by including Black Ops 6 in the subscription service. For all we know, the impact on Black Ops 7 may have been more.
But this all calls into question the viability of the model to begin with. At what point will other franchises become “too big” to be included in the service day one? The Elder Scrolls 6, perhaps? (If it ever comes out, of course.)
Sony, perhaps in acknowledgement of the pressure being piled on from Redmond, famously did its own experiment on all this with Horizon Forbidden West, which it chucked it into PS Plus Extra just a year after it launched.
While the game’s full-price sales were tracking very closely to predecessor Horizon Zero Dawn, it estimated losses in the region of $85 million by bringing the game to its subscription service too soon.
We have seen other first-party games join PS Plus Extra since, but they’ve come later, like Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, which was added earlier this year, over three years after its original release.
To be fair, Sony has continued to make its various tiers of PS Plus attractive; PS Plus Extra is particularly good value for money these days, and at $14.99 per month it’s significantly cheaper than Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. But of course, it does lack those day one first-party games.
But all the changes and tweaking from Microsoft suggest Sony was on point all along, and it deserves credit for not blinking under intense pressure.
Microsoft is apparently planning to make its service more modular moving forwards, but there’s still an argument to be made about whether buffet-style subscriptions like this even make sense given the attention demands of gaming. You can’t enjoy many titles passively like you can music and movies, which is why Spotify and Disney+ make a lot more sense.
That’s not to say subscriptions don’t have value, of course: if you’re the type of player that greedily consumes a lot of content, then you can’t really go wrong with either offering.
But the days of the ‘Netflix of Gaming’ seem long behind us, and we suspect you may see plenty more flip-flopping from Microsoft moving forward as it continues to unwind a model that clearly never made much sense at all.