Xbox Just Made Gamepass Worse

this is going to be fun because the best deal in gaming has just got a bit worse Game Pass is Clear Day One on Game Pass offer has actually got a lot more exclusive it's now mostly not on Game Pass if you break it down by its tiers so if that benefit was your biggest draw this isn't good because you're now going to have to pay double what you used to before and of course we all know why the subscription business is number of users churn rate Revenue per user that's the kind of thing that dominates it so if new user slow the immediate move is to charge people more money doing so can though increase your churn rate and that means that Phil Spencer is playing a fairly highrisk game hell this may even violate stuff that they told Regulators they wouldn't do in order to help get the whole Activision deal over the line so it's a pretty damn crazy situation what is crazy though is not checking out today's sponsor us specifically at ball. games where we publish loading screen daily for our members now loading screen is on our site it also is in your inbox as a newsletter and on loading screen we cover games as they're coming out and loads of breaking stories as well as things that we're not able to cover here on the main Channel with videos it's only be getting better and better as time goes on I think it's a fantastic daily read to throw into your rotation perhaps if you're taking the bus reading over breakfast that kind of thing so if you want to give us a shot you can consider a free trial over at bell. games and get loading screen it's the single best way that you can actually support what we do so a big thank you to everyone who is chipping in over there right now with that said let's get into the news Okay so Xbox is rolling out a new system for Game Pass their main claim here is that it will mean more options for gamers but of course in reality it really just means you're going to be paying more money so here's the rub we start with Xbox game pass core this has got online console multiplayer access to 25 catalog titles and Xbox discounts you've then got standard that's again online console multiplayer the 25 catalog titles discounts and then the full game pass catalog brackets the full game pass catalog is not the full catalog of games that are on Game Pass because for all of those like day one release games well they will only go into the catalog basically after up to 12 months and if you don't want to wait a year there's of course ultimate that basically has got all of the same things inclusive of the day one games but also EA play and a bunch of like Riot game things and also cloud gaming access now obviously the bit we care about the most here is money and for core oh wow the price is the same monthly yearly it's actually risen to 75 bucks up from 60 bucks standard then is what seems to be replacing Game Pass for console which was their previous branding of that so Game Pass for console was $110.99 the new Game Pass standard is $4.99 so that definitely is creeping up and then ultimate goes up from $16.99 to $19.99 a month and that's with these new prices kicking in July for new users and then from September member for anybody who has got a recurring subscription which basically just means if you wanted to like lock in a oneyear sub of the better deal now is basically the time to do that now if you're somehow like a afficianado of Game Pass you may have noticed that the existing Xbox game pass for consoles is actually gone now that's the tier that did not have online multiplayer but did have Day One release games so if you're an existing subscriber for that well good news until you cancel you basically get to retain your existing benefits and that seemingly does include the day one releases that's good but obviously the second you enter membership you will no longer have that benefit and basically that far far better deal assuming you don't want the multiplayer anyway now from September they're going to be removing the ability to stack subscriptions of that service right that's using prepaid cards you can't stack Beyond 13 months but you can basically top up to 13 months indefinitely which is a little bit strange I I don't know like are they hoping people will forget or something kind of weird but anyway stock up ahead of September if you're concerned about that otherwise though that product is actually dead for new users it's just not a thing then we get to what most of us are I think which is PC and basically you get PC game pass which is the PC games catalog Day One releases Xbox and Game Pass discounts as well as EA play and Riot game stuff for $1.99 up from $9.99 that basically means that compared to everybody else we're making out like Bandits I mean we've had an inflation bump in the price that has absolutely happened but we're not seeing a gutting of core benefits that really does matter because over an Xbox land you got to pay 20 bucks a month if you want to get the day one releases so analysis wise this is not the most complicated thing we've ever broken down in the channel their aim is obvious they just want more people paying for ultimate right that's entirely the plan and we know that because they've moved to the biggest benefit which is day one for brand new games of course by day one I don't really mean day one because as we all know games actually launch and in this magical mystical time a few days before day one and you got to pay more money via more expensive addition for that so yeah imagine imagine if it was Starfield again you would have day one access to Starfield but because of the Early Access period on top of your ultimate which is now more expensive you'd also have to buy the more expensive like Premium Edition upgrade and I bring that up because I'm wondering if Game Pass ultimate is more expensive will they still try to pull that kind of shenanigans with Early Access now the main thing here is pointed out by John here in Twitter a year of Game Pass was 95 weird when series X came out now if you basically want the same thing with the day one stuff you've got to pay 180 quid a year it has basically just doubled and as he says I think I'd rather just buy the games yeah absolutely let me know below are you on a Game Pass tier and at what stage would you actually decide to make that switch and just buy the games UPF front even if you were paying slightly more to have access for all of those games but of course in a non-subscription format let me know now the other thing some people are always raising a sort of conspiracy theory that the price is going up essentially to try and get people to buy more games right and I suppose you could see the logic there but I would argue back by saying that Microsoft have actually seemingly anyway being kind of disappointed about the growth of Game Pass so if they were to try and push people to buy games regularly but I suppose like wielding the game pass discount that they might have that would almost say to me that like they were being a victim of their own success with Game Pass and it doesn't really look like that I'd certainly say that plenty of devs wouldn't be angry at the idea of just getting more people on Xbox consoles to actually buy games as an example here James who's a freelance critic has been talking to devs and he's had devs this week basically say that they find it hard to like actually justify a physical release for an Xbox game because the user base is just not conditioned to buy games much less discs as he puts it I definitely think that is the case I mean if you look at save the switch that's a bunch of people who are a little bit more conditioned to actually buy physical games I am absolutely not seeing that on the Xbox side of things even in terms of my personal playtime as somebody who has an Xbox series X and uses Game Pass yeah I've not bought things in that platform and to be honest buying things on the platform almost feels a little bit worse to me and I guess that's because I'm just kind of used to the Free Library maybe it's a little bit like how if you have say Amazon Prime video but you see something on there that you do actually just have to go and buy there's maybe just a little bit of friction because you've basically been conditioned that you just have all of the things included in your sub so I've got to wonder if there's an impact on player Behavior there certainly a lot of devs have been worried about the well the value perception of games that if everything just goes into these big silly bundle things then basically will'll end up devaluing games and to be honest it's a theory that I'm kind of partial to I mean I think about other types of media right back in the day you had to buy a box set for something okay you had to buy a physical box set buy your Blu-rays now that's no longer the case and so the question is basically what's changed with that shift over to the subscription Services I'm not exactly sure but I remember say the economics of something like Band of Brothers back in the day for HBO because they could basically guarantee stupendous amounts of money from selling the physical copies nowadays things are just changing a little bit now obviously games are interacted with in a very different way to say film or music so it is going to be different for our industry but we are basically Reckoning with a highly similar thing to refocus to the core of the story though Xbox's problem is they've now actually got a full schedule of games to ship many more games from first party Studios that are being heavily marketed as Day One on Game Pass and it basically looks like it's going to be that for the next few years I mean that's a lot of $70 games that you would not be forking over $70 for Xbox wants to release games each quarter so I mean come on just think about the obvious think about the Lost potential Revenue that's obviously something they tried to mitigate with the premium edition upgrade stuff they've been pulling for like Early Access say with star field but I'm not sure maybe that just wasn't as successful as it could have been as it stands now the standard is going to be that people have a core subscription obviously for the online multiplayer they would then want them to hop up to standard so that they can maybe access more of those games and then on top of that they would be buying games on day one which basically would be a humongous win for Xbox and other than that what oh they're going to be getting 20 bucks a month for Game Pass ultimate so from their perspective if the task is to get more money out of the existing audience yeah this is basically going to win on either front again though this is an audience problem specifically one of that audience not expanding fast enough that's why they've been doing the likes of removing Xbox Live Gold why they've been centralizing everything into a system that then lets them just get people up that pricing ladder to the better tiers but still in face value this doesn't look like the sort of move that would grow the size of Game Pass right increase that audience however there's Call of Duty and that I think is the thing that could change all of this Call of Duty is absolutely godamn humongous and for a lot of people the whole 20 a month thing might actually make sense because of Call of Duty and it's actually specifically interesting for Call of Duty because there's a new one every year and they basically all feed into the same overarching live service if they were to do the whole 12 month late thing then well the time that you would get access to a Call of Duty outside of Game Pass ultimate would basically be the time to go and buy the next Call of Duty game so that would be a strong incentive for just Cod people to live on that more expensive tier now obviously that tier is really expensive it would be hinging on people assuming that in addition to Cod they would get plenty of extra value so Baseline here this is about increasing average revenue per user doing so can put off new users but they probably think that now is the time to pull the trigger because they'll have more games and they've got Call of Duty the plan basically is that the increased turn rate from a move like this could then be offset by more games so that's the plan more money from console and they're obviously finding that console is not expanding that makes a lot of sense we are consistently just seeing headlines of Xboxes not selling there is though PC so let's talk about PC because PC is actually the thing that gets unscathed here it remains a pretty good deal so why would they have it be a disproportionately better deal why is some ultimate PC thing that's got Day One games not like 17 bucks or 20 bucks I think the reason pretty damn simple they see loads of PC users they probably see slow growth so they think that this needs to be a strong product offering of course I would counter by saying that well most of us play on Steam so you're going to have to do some sort of steam integration just like EA play does though if they do that they'll obviously be losing money to games so yeah who knows maybe they don't now there is another side to this that side is cloud and honestly that's where I think the plan just kind of completely breaks down so they've been talking up recently things like Xbox on a fire stick or on Smart TVs as an example at home we've got a Samsung Smart TV and it does indeed have an Xbox app on it which is really really annoying if you also have an Xbox plugged into your TV because then you just have Xbox icons in places that do different things now this makes absolutely no sense to me because the only way to get cloud is the most expensive tier that is $20 a month now let's compare $20 a month to the price of a fire stick like a fire stick is a value oriented product the entire point is this is people who don't have a console who don't have a PC who are just playing these I don't know on an app in their TV right who are only going to be doing cloud gaming well their way to acquire this new audience bace seems to be the most expensive like Game Pass thing that is so bizarre to me like why is there not a game pass Cloud that has basically got the Game Pass Library no Day One releases and cost less money so they can actually hope to acquire users via this like I don't know this vertical it just seems weird to me speaking of weird some Regulators may think that this is all a little bit weird in terms of timing because yes Call of Duty Black Ops 6 will be coming out Game Pass on day one actually Microsoft are obliged to do that and the reason why is they actually said that this is one of the consumer benefits that they promised Regulators as a part of the acquisition that basically people would be able to get Call of Duty like for less money and they were trying to say that this is one of the great consumer benefits okay so they've said that but the problem for Microsoft is they said they wouldn't increase the price yes like they said the Call of Duty thing would not lead to a price increase and now we're in a bit of a strange like situation because there is a price increase and that price increase is time to be rather close to a new Call of Duty game but can you prove a causal link right beyond all Reasonable Doubt the answer there probably is no they could simply justify that they've not been seeing the user growth that they wanted and therefore they've had to increase the price that's why there's a price increase and it's not to do with Call of Duty or maybe it's to be in line with them having way more first-party games from things outside of Call of Duty like they could they could basically argue around this obviously I don't buy the Call of Duty's got nothing to do with this right because users are effectively going to get the new Call of Duty for the price of their subscription rather than $70 and that is a potentially major drop in day one sales revenue they obviously will want to level that out into some nice tasty recurring subscription Revenue that it's at a pretty damn High Baseline I suppose in a way Game Pass was a massive Gambit it was essentially baking in a hell of a lot of growth growth that didn't appear now they're left with Game Pass and I suppose their challenge basically is a sustainable version of Game Pass that doesn't cannibalize their revenue and I guess this is what they think it looks like you know it's it's funny like over a year ago and I mean even a little bit before that those of us sort of on the dev or publisher side of the industry we've known that stuff has been way way way more tight on a like sort of financial basis uh from Game Pass I guess it's just interesting seeing a lot of that actually Ripple out into the consumer side now so anyway that's basically it that's the story will you pay more money will you upgrade and if you're currently an ultimate are you going to stay there do let me know and be sure not to miss the video that I published yesterday basically I published at like half 11 at night so pretty decent chance you didn't see it anyway that will replace my face in the little box thingy so give it a click thanks for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: Bellular News

Views: 9,907

Keywords: xbox, microsoft, game pass, game pass price increase, game pass july, game pass games, game pass xbox, game pass 2024, pc gaming news, gaming news, steam, pc

Id: 8UZQR1N_xX8

Length: 15min 40sec (940 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 12 2024