In what is perhaps the least shocking plot twist since a final boss having a second phase, Xbox has confirmed that its 2025 Game Pass price hike sent millions of subscribers running for the exit. Matthew Ball, Xbox's Chief Strategy Officer, dropped this spicy admission during a live session at The Game Business event in Summer Game Fest week, as reported by Niche Gamer.
Microsoft hiked the price of Game Pass Ultimate back in October 2025, and it turns out gamers - a notoriously price-sensitive species - did not simply sit there and take the damage. Ball confirmed the subscriber losses were in the millions, which is a pretty wild number to be casually dropping at an industry panel like it's patch notes for a game nobody plays anymore.
To be fair to Xbox, raising subscription prices is basically the industry's current speedrun strategy, with everyone from Netflix to your local gym membership trying to pull off the same move. The difference is that Game Pass was specifically built on the promise of incredible value - it was the whole pitch. Jacking up the price is kind of like nerfing your game's most beloved feature mid-season and expecting nobody to notice.
The real question now is whether Microsoft views those lost subscribers as acceptable collateral damage on the road to profitability, or if this is the kind of stat that causes some serious respawning of their pricing strategy. Ball's willingness to publicly acknowledge the losses suggests Xbox at least knows it's sitting in the death screen, even if it hasn't quite decided which checkpoint to reload from.
For now, Game Pass trudges on, still home to day-one first-party releases and a genuinely solid library. But if Xbox wants to win back those millions of unsubscribed players, it might need to do more than just gesture vaguely at the Activision Blizzard catalogue and hope for the best.
