Subscription fatigue is real – has Game Pass price hike finally tipped the balance?

I hate a particular type of email more than the ones I get from the tax people. The ones that start with something along the lines of, “We are bringing you so much great new stuff to your subscription…” and further down say, “in order to keep bringing you this phenomenal value we will be increasing your monthly payment to (insert amount that seems insignificant at face value but when added up across a huge subscriber base is a profiteering scandal)”.

From YouTube Premium to Spotify, to Netflix, to Disney+’s brazen hike just days after the Kimmel incident, and backpedaling, they all do it. So, those with multiple subscriptions find their outgoings not just going up by a dollar or two, but by several times that amount. It’s worse if you subscribe to sports providers as well.

Whatever your views on Microsoft’s frankly ridiculous Game Pass shuffle earlier in the week, it’s not for me. We have two Ultimate subs on the go in this household currently, but not for much longer. I don’t want to pay more and get Fortnite Crew. It’s worthless to me. I want to pay a reasonable amount of money per month. And that amount is way less than $60.

The director of gaming and platform communications at Microsoft, Dustin Blackwell, told The Verge: “We understand price increases are never fun for anybody, but we’re trying to reinforce by adding more value to these plans as well. It’s something we don’t take lightly, and we’re listening to the feedback of players and the community to try to provide them with more of what they’re asking for.”

Just give us a Family tier, that’s all we ask

Well, Dustin, what many others and I want is a Family Pass for Game Pass. Why on earth isn’t there one? The only reason I can think of is that Microsoft thinks it will cost them money.

They have dabbled with trials historically, but nothing has even come to fruition. YouTube and Spotify don’t have a problem with it, although they remain overpriced; there is at least a tier that allows us to cut costs here, but while this new restructuring was the perfect opportunity to introduce one, there was not a peep. I’m not talking about setting a console as a home console and clumsy workarounds; I am talking about multiple people, with the same account in the same household, playing things like CoD at the same time and paying a reasonable amount for it

The Game Pass price rise, coupled with the increase in console price at a time when the world’s pockets are squeezed more than ever, feels like one last-ditch attempt to cash in before some impending crash. The subs model was never supposed to bankrupt people, but when everybody gets greedy at the same time, something will give sooner rather than later.