Netflix Spotify Disney and Amazon proved that price hikes are effective at increasing profits even despite the loss of subscribers. Capitalism baby.

I think the only time collective cancellations actually hurt one of these companies was that time Jimmy Kimmel made fun of the president and it took an estimated 1.7M ex-Disney Plus subscribers.

It's honestly cheaper to just buy games than pay this subscription per year.

Plus, you get to keep the games.

Pro financial tip: Be a patient gamer. Get the games you are interested in during sales. Fuck FOMO, subscription models and pre-orders.

Honestly, I've kinda gone back to buying physical media.

I bought DK Bananza on cart, and guess what? After I finished it, I gave it to my brother. Imagine that! Sharing a game you own? Madness.

I'm eager to pick up Ghost of Yotei from the store this afternoon, as well.

The thing about this shit is...

Microsoft, like Google, is now a user-data driven company and they have already made loss/profit ratio analysis on this long before they released the price increase. They're absolutely banking on people cancelling but making up the difference and then some from the people who stay.

For a thought experiment let's consider how many subscribers they were reported to have in Feburary: 34 million. Let's assume that everyone is paying for the highest tier to make the math easier. So current income would be 34 million user x $20 a month and thats $680 million a month. New income of 34 million users x $30 a month is $1.02 billion. The difference is $340 million a month. Let's divide that by $30 a month. That gets us about 11,333,333 users. So they can hemorrhage over 11 million users and still break even. To make sure, let's subtract 11 million users. That gives us 23 million users. 23 million users x $30 a month is $690 million a month, a cool $10 million a month above current profits.

For final context, 11 million users is roughly 32% of their entire subscriber count. They can afford to lose a third of the people subscribing and still make money.

The math doesn't bode well for us who vote with our wallets.

I haven't subbed to gamepads for years because I knew this would eventually happen. Gamepass was designed to get people used to not purchasing games and instead letting them come to them. Subscribers now have to chose between paying even more each month or losing access to the library of games available to them.

Knowing Microsoft, I'd like to thing that it went down like this:

Pardon me, your department isn't achieving the expected 20% annual revenue increase.

But we're just selling subscriptions to games that cost us nearly nothing. It's free money.

And you need to make more money from it, increase your subscriber count or your costs, or we'll cut your staff.

You know, fundamentally, I don't hate Gamepass as a concept. "Netflix, but for videogames" is an idea I can get behind, as it widens the audience for something I love by lowering the bar of entry. There are plenty of people out there that benefit from being able to play a few games here and there without needing to commit hundreds of hours to $100 purchases.

But Netflix has overstepped with price hikes and ads, and I've cancelled my service with them. That Microsoft thinks it can charge some ~$40CAD a month is pure hubris. I hope they learn quickly that, at that price point, the enthusiast market will happily cancel and just buy their games outright, and the casual market will decide it's an expense they don't need.

The price increase is absurd. I cancelled too, because while I do play quite a bit, this level of corporate greed is completely unjustifiable to me. If rather watch playthroughs of new games on Twitch or YouTube and then buy them a year later on sale than pay this bloody much, eff that.

It's nice they pulled this nonsense during a steam sale. Cancelled and picked up halo mcc and silksong.

I already canceled because of the atrocities Microsoft does / is / supports.

I canceled. I don’t want the features they added. I don’t even use all the features they charge me for now. I just want to be able to try out so new games every so often. I’ll take the $30 I save and buy those same games, probably with some money leftover

Between the cost of housing and the cost of food, and the fact wages aren't that much better than they were 15 years ago - you'd think they would realize they are asking for the scraps people have left.

I've always just bought games when they're on a good sale, I've never had a game pass type thing. But maybe they just want to squeeze a bit more out of their most loyal customers and they're accepting that it is a dying model.

EA also further buried the ability to cancel EA accounts, after the announcement they had been sold to the Saudis and Kushner.

Buying isn't owning, but it has to be better than this...

Just canceled my 4 year old subscription. Can’t wait to hear the complaints from my kid but Netflix is likely next.

Never would I ever subscribe to a game service. That's just me.

I work in the IT software licensing industry, it's a fucking cancer I can't wait to fail so bad that when we have the first extended internet outage failure so bad that it shows the world that subscriptions are a liability that shouldn't exist

I really appreciate this, you just saved me at least $20.

Microsoft’s user experience is awful at every step in a browser. I wanted to like XBox but it’s clear why they’re losing.

For years I've been warning whoever would listen that XboxGP, much like any other content subscription service owned by a public company would inevitably lead to a massive consumer squeeze. Fortunately it happened before MS managed to metastasise into a monopoly in gaming too. Good riddance.

Now is probably not the best time to sell my xbox.... I bet the market is flooding

Getting users to pay extra for features that should already be included with their overpriced consoles is such a scam.