I think I'm done with Xbox Game Pass

I pay for a lot of subscriptions I don't use. I do this for all sorts of reasons. Maybe you do too!

I paid for a higher-tier Adobe Creative Cloud subscription that included Adobe Premiere for years because I thought that some day I’d reboot my old YouTube channel. I subscribe to a handful of smaller creators on Patreon — even if I don’t always have time for their content — because I like the idea of supporting their work.

For a time, Xbox Game Pass (pithily: a Netflix-like service for video games¹ ) fell under that same umbrella. My subscription was mostly aspirational: I appreciated the availability of a massive catalog of games I could dip into on a whim, as well as access to titles like Forza Horizon 4 and Psychonauts 2 that I wouldn’t have otherwise purchased. In the long run, I’m not sure that the math on the subscription worked in my favor, but I tolerated that because 1) I believed I would ultimately benefit from being signed up and 2) I wasn’t really paying attention.

That changed earlier this week, when Microsoft announced a slew of changes to the service, introducing price hikes, revamped subscription tiers, and the deprecation of certain features from the lower tiers. I really don’t want to write a paragraph-long, point-by-point explanation of the specific changes. They are myriad and they are convoluted and I didn’t like learning about them in the first place and I don’t like the idea of spelling them out just like I know you wouldn’t enjoy reading them. In short, though: If the original pitch for Game Pass was simple — “pay a monthly fee for access to a rotating catalog of games plus day-one access to first-party titles from Microsoft” — now the service is a mess of tiers, offering fewer features at greater cost. Particularly galling: Day-one access, once the marquee selling point for Game Pass, has become an exclusive perk of the most expensive tier.

Now, after years of being a subscriber, I’m finally working up to canceling.

When I was a professional games journalist (i.e. when The Washington Post paid me to do games journalism) I took some pride in believing that I understood Microsoft’s business strategy. Though Microsoft still makes consoles, their ambition is to reach audiences beyond the Xbox devices and build an “ecosystem” that attends to players’ needs wherever they’re comfortable. In theory then, when Microsoft finally started releasing blockbuster first-party games, that ecosystem would be instrumental toward getting those games into the maximum number of players’ hands.²

“When we look at the state of our medium,” Spencer wrote February in an internal memo obtained by The Verge, “we see players increasingly gaming on multiple devices, but their experience is defined by the fragmentation created by platform silos. Multi-device players have to navigate multiple identities, entitlement libraries, communities, wallets, and reward programs.”

“We have a different vision for the future of gaming,” he added. “A future where players have a unified experience across devices. A future where players can easily discover a vast array of games with a diverse spectrum of business models. A future where more creators are empowered to realize their creative vision, reach a global audience, unite their communities, and succeed commercially. A future where every screen is an Xbox.”

Spencer has said that he views any device running Game Pass as effectively an Xbox, which makes the service a big part of his vision. But following through on that vision — building an ecosystem — isn’t flashy work, and Xbox has a reputation for over-complicating things. The two major examples of this that people always bring up are Microsoft’s botched Xbox One launch and the confusing and uninspired Series X and Series S naming convention for their latest devices. (We can add the recent Game Pass updates to the list.)

Back when it was my job to pay close attention to the Xbox business, I scoffed at the received wisdom about Microsoft. I was a nerd, I liked my Xbox devices, and I liked rooting for the apparent underdog even more. But having spent more time than I’d like this past week poring over emails from Microsoft about “upcoming changes to my membership” and graphics breaking down comparisons between costs and features of different Game Pass plans, I’ve started to take a more pessimistic view of the company. I do not want to look at this kind of stuff. I do not want to choose between plans. I already do that with health care. My passion for comparing products begins and ends with novelty synthesizers and wildflower seed mixes.

If you’re a consistent Xbox gamer, the math on a Game Pass subscription probably works out in your favor. But Spencer has talked a lot about how the console market isn’t growing, which implies to me that Xbox is seeking people outside of the “consistent Xbox gamer” category. And I’m just not sure how making a more expensive product with fewer features serves that audience.

Granted, I am not a casual gamer. I am an insane person who plays an obscene amount of VALORANT, a game about getting as mad as humanely possible at strangers. But that doesn’t mean I’m interested in gaming’s version of fine print. I am sympathetic to Spencer’s vision. But I do not want to need to understand Microsoft’s business strategy to feel comfortable being a part of their entertainment ecosystem.

The elephant in the room is that none of this would be a problem if Microsoft were releasing good first-party exclusives. PlayStation has its own weird membership service, but I don’t terribly care about the ways in which it succeeds or fails because Sony excels at publishing can’t-miss culture-setting titles for the PlayStation. (I thought The Last of Us on HBO was dreadful, but Xbox doesn’t have anything comparable on a cultural level because the studios owned by Microsoft are not producing original work of note).

Stuck in this fallow period, Xbox executives have resorted to behavior that I find just a bit unseemly. It is unbecoming of a major corporation to vision-board the future while not actually building it, to moan and apologize publicly for missing targets and changing plans, while, on top of it all, not actually putting out good games. Please be serious. The term “virtue signaling” has taken on a weird valence of late, but I would struggle to otherwise characterize the gap between the Microsoft’s lofty rhetoric and its naked inability to deliver (made all the more evident by the recent Game Pass price hike).

The older version of Game Pass was for years lauded as “the best deal in gaming.” It was a simple pitch and people liked it. But if the Xbox team is allergic to simplicity, it needs to at least explain why it is pursuing certain choices and changes. And if it wants to keep people subscribed to its service (and even bring new people in!) it should give players something to aspire to: namely, the chance to play good, new Xbox exclusives.

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1. I would have written “Netflix for video games” but Netflix does publish video games, which would make Netflix the Netflix of video games.

2. If you’re an Xbox executive and this doesn’t sound quite right to you, I’d love to hear from you!