Xbox says Game Pass lost millions after Ultimate price hike

Microsoft’s 50 percent Game Pass Ultimate hike did more than irritate subscribers. It cost the service “millions” of users, Xbox chief strategy officer Matthew Ball said, turning a pricing move into a blunt warning about how fragile the subscription pitch can be when the bill rises faster than the perceived value.

The pain landed on October 1, 2025, when Microsoft pushed Ultimate from $19.99 a month to $29.99 and overhauled the entire lineup. Game Pass Core became Essential, Standard became Premium, and Ultimate stayed the top tier. Microsoft framed the new Ultimate package as a bigger bundle, with Ubisoft+ Classics, Fortnite Crew, enhanced cloud gaming, and more than 75 day-one releases a year, including all Xbox-published games. PC Game Pass also went up in some regions, from $16.49 to $19.99.

That was the bet: ask players to pay more, then justify it with a thicker catalog and more perks. Ball’s comments, delivered at The Game Business Live during Summer Game Fest, suggest the math did not work the way Microsoft wanted. For a service that has long been one of Xbox’s clearest differentiators, losing millions of subscribers after a single price change is a sharp reminder that loyalty in game subscriptions has limits.

The backlash also landed in a wider wave of Xbox cost increases. The Game Pass hike arrived alongside higher hardware prices, making the subscription change feel less like an isolated tweak and more like part of a broader push to raise the cost of staying inside the Xbox ecosystem. For players, that matters because Game Pass only works when the monthly fee feels easier to swallow than buying games outright. Once the gap narrows too far, the value proposition starts to wobble.

Microsoft has already shown it noticed. In April 2026, the company said Game Pass Ultimate would drop back to $22.99 a month, saying the change reflected player feedback. That rollback suggests Microsoft is still trying to find the price ceiling for a service built on volume, not just prestige. The company can keep dressing up Ultimate with day-one releases, cloud features, and added subscriptions, but the October 2025 spike showed that even Game Pass can lose its edge when the monthly number on the screen gets too high.