Xbox Game Pass price cut but day-one Call of Duty access ended

Game Pass gives players access to a vault of Xbox games for a flat monthly fee.

But a recent leaked internal memo from new boss Asha Sharma, seen by The Verge, external, admitted it had “become too expensive for players”.

In the UK, Game Pass Ultimate has dropped from £22.99 to £16.99 a month and PC Game Pass from £13.49 to £10.99 a month, with prices varying in other territories.

Six months ago, news that Microsoft had hiked the price of the subscription service by more than 50% was met with anger from fans, with many claiming they would cancel.

Christopher Dring, editor of The Game Business, said the price cut reflects the “challenge”, external Microsoft faces to regain fans’ trust in the brand.

Xbox, as with many other companies in the industry, has been hit with waves of layoffs and cancelled projects over recent years.

An announcement in 2024 that it would begin to publish formerly exclusive titles on other consoles was met with further backlash from fans.

Following the leaked memo from Sharma, business professor Joost van Dreunen said he believed, external it was likely “Xbox will start relying much more heavily on advertising” rather than subscription services or content to make money.

He added that under Sharma, who started in the role in February, Xbox was more likely to “behave like a scaled platform business, monetizing audience attention rather than just access to content”.

Sharma, previously an AI executive at Microsoft, stated her mission was to “understand what makes this work and protect it”.

The recent announcement that Microsoft’s Xbox division was working on a new console, code-named Project Helix, showed, she said at the time, the “commitment to the return of Xbox”.