After the United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) publicly stated that the recent price increase and tier changes to Xbox Game Pass would inflict “consumer harm”, Microsoft has come back with a message of their own.
In a new filing (via The Verge), Microsoft says that the FTC’s letter is “misleading” and gives an “extra-record account of the facts.”
“It is wrong to call this [Xbox Game Pass Standard] a “degraded” version of the discontinued Game Pass for Console offering,” Microsoft says.
“That discontinued product did not offer multiplayer functionality, which had to be purchased separately for an additional $9.99/month (making the total cost $20.98/month). While Game Pass Ultimate’s price will increase from $16.99 to $19.99/month, the service will offer more value through many new games available “day-and-date.” Among them is the upcoming release of Call of Duty, which has never before been available on a subscription day-and-date.”
The letter adds that the FTC “barely mentioned” during the trial surrounding Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard. The focus of the trial as that Microsoft could keep Call of Duty off of PlayStation consoles. That, Microsoft says, has nothing to do with the price and tier changes to Game Pass.
“While the FTC has now tried to shift focus to its alleged subscription market, its letter does not map onto its arguments below,” Microsoft said. “Setting aside that it is common for businesses to change service offerings over time, the FTC’s case in all of its alleged markets has always been premised on vertical foreclosure, i.e., that Microsoft would withhold Call of Duty from rivals and therefore harm competition. But even in the alleged subscription market, Call of Duty is not being withheld from anyone who wants it.”
The letter closes with the company saying that there is “no evidence” to harming competition.
What do you make of Microsoft’s response to the FTC’s letter surrounding the Xbox Game Pass price increase? For more Insider Gaming, read about the early sales numbers for College Football 25.
Imagine having to pay to play multiplayer on top of paying for your Internet service every month ?♂️
I mean it was that way originally for a reason. When Xbox live came out it was a new service that cost money to run the servers and for a long time it was miles better than sonys version precisely because it was a paid service. Your Internet bill doesn’t pay for my Microsoft’s server time.
Okay this is my opinion. I like game pass but I was against it grin the beginning. Of it life. I saw what they were planning. First give you all these game you can access for little to nothing. Which was cool but then they started taxing the games. And game pass has gone up from a fun thing to and expensive thing. The next thing there going to do is not produce consoles anymore Mark my words cause your reading it here. No more consoles just game pass and access to any digital game you bought. It to cut the middle man and cut out the production of gaming console. So you never really own anything and your subject to there regulations and rules then. Yes you have rights concerning your digital purchase. But then what if you have no internet. You can’t get your digital content. There are no disk so you have not physical game to play.. I love my xboxs from the original the SX. But I getting fed up with these changes and so many of them. And what can you do.My stand is if they keep going up on prices Im Not paying and I guess my video game days are over cause I refuse to pay any thing over what I’m paying now. I remember when xbox gold was like $50 or $60 a year. And now your going to be paying that almost a month
Idk I mean I never had to pay beyond xbox live to play multiplayer. Then when I got Gamepass (but not ultimate) I still didn’t pay extra for multiplayer. I did upgrade to Ultimate, eventually, but that was because it offered extra games + cloud gaming.
My point being I’ve never heard of anyone not being able to play multiplayer unless you didn’t pay for Xbox Live or anything.
Imagine having no idea at all about how the internet, gaming online and servers work. Do some research.
What are you talking about, we’ve been doing that for years already. That’s what xbox live was.
Corporate will do what it does best, pad their pockets at the expense of their users. The price has increased and the value really hasn’t.
The hypocrisy of Sony fans comes to mind when I read this. This article was actually very unbiased, but I had to scroll through multiple trending anti Microsoft articles ( there is a fresh assortment every day ).If the roles were reversed, and Sony was doing this, there would be zero articles complaining about it. Sony fans complain repeatedly that Microsoft had zero exclusives, then when they acquire studios, it’s all of a sudden unfair. Even still, call of duty is available on PlayStation after the acquisition. I could go on and on. Sony can do no wrong. Cracks me up.
Well the PlayStation greats have started on or have had a long healthy relationship with Sony, they’re not removing products from a wider audience, they’re just creating their own things. They even encourage Xbox to do original exclusives.
This is the best & realist comment on here. Sony raised their prices on their subscription service, game console and now on games, and all we heard were crickets.
You are 1000% right, and that ? above your comment is wrong. Gampass has a ton of new & old games that justify the price increase. Sony on the other hand definitely didn’t do anything to justify any of their price hikes and the ? ? ? over at the FTC are complete fools and said nothing about Sony dirty tactics.
Here’s an issue Microsoft will have to address in the near future.
as game pass ultimate cannons to 20$/month, some ultimate subscribers will have to rely on rewards points+earned income to stay active. Microsoft should put purchased games with respective licenses on a flash drive with native structures to play off the flash drive. Even if I have to supply my own flash or portable SSD.
The premise is like getting recovery stick with a purchased PC.
It is a degraded service. I moved to the core gamepass and I no longer have access to several games. Games that I did have access to prior to this service degradation.
The ‘Day One’ releases are not the only games that you lose. Hell Let Loose says gamepass on it and it was released YEARS ago. This is just one example. When you look at the list of available games and compare it to what we previously had, it is less than half.
Hold on if 20 a month is breaking people they really need to reevaluate how they spend there money. 20 is nearly price of McDonald’s these days. So maybe eat out 1 or 2 times less in a month and you have your money easy. Especially when games cost 70 for standered edition with no dlc or year pass. But add the extras and most AAA games cost 100 now at minimum. Buy two brand new AAA games and you about paid a year for Gamepass ultimate…so yea still a deal.
That’s exactly why as a game pass ultimate user myself I’m not complaining. Game pass ultimate pays for itself because you get not only day one releases but you also get access to EA play which in turn gets you discounts plus free games from them as well. I would say just by having game pass ultimate in my life I’ve actually saved more because I get discounts on games and movies plus like you mentioned buying a AAA game as it stands today which is about $73 including tax game pass ultimate is way more affordable. Honestly it’s even still has room to grow a little bit more.
Both of these comments lack real world experience. “Go to McDonald’s 1 or 2 times less a month,” dude, $20 should get you 5 trips to McDonald’s, but you said yourself it is only a few. This is due to inflation, something that the President in the U.S. only recently acknowledged being out of control due to the recent debate. It’s artificial inflation so companies can increased their CEO’s salaries and staff less people. But still inflation, inflation that directly affects everyone.
My budget for paying for online for games is $50 a yesr and always will be $50. So if these companies decide to go $20 per month or $75 a year, I’m out. I can play online on other platforms.
Found the XBox shell. Smh.
Deal or not they told the ftc consumers would not be effected, prices wouldn’t rise, and the lied. They should never have been allowed to acquire Activision to begin with. Microsoft is a huge monopoly already owning far too much control in daily computing for consumers. The problem is our country has had anti trust laws decimated going back to the Reagan administration. When one company as big as Microsoft controls so much of an industry it stifles competition and hurts consumers. I say this owning a series x and a ps5. Sony has bought studios and perhaps they shouldn’t be allowed either but the difference is Sony made about a third the revenue of Microsoft in 2023. It’s a far larger company. Either way monopolies are screwing over consumers. I’ll never pay 20 a month to any of them for the service. They don’t offer enough new games for that. Hell I have played the vast majority of the games Microsoft offers on gamepass and they don’t put enough new on to make it worth 20$ a month. I buy cd keys and get it for $8 a month. If I ever can’t I won’t keep it. I canceled Sonys a long time ago. I won’t reward corporate greed by giving them more money. They made net profit of 72 billion last year and paid the ceo 48 million. They keep trying to call it inflation but you can’t say that when you’re raking in money. They can afford to offer a cheaper service they just don’t want to. Can’t keep shareholders rich that way.
The amount of absolute crap games is not worth $20 a month. Most will only be paying for CoD from now on. It is cheaper for them to buy CoD than it is for them to rent it.
Okay, so don’t buy game pass. Easy peasy.
If u own a pc, Xbox and ps5 paying more and more just to use consoles online is getting ridiculous. Say u work most the time. Have 6 days off a month. Your really only playing 6 days a month if that. And realize the system u use the least cost the most. I haven’t touched my xbox in months but still paid. Now they want more for me to just have the option to play. Na, Canceled.
You can’t buy Game Pass using Microsoft Rewards, it’s being disabled in August.
They’re turning the screw now before the new CoD releases.
They can’t have a repeat of Starfield where people just use MS Rewards to try it, they need actual growth.
Game Pass is dying on its ass, and if their $69 billion investment in Call of Duty doesn’t move the needle, it’s basically done and dusted.
I don’t play multiplayer or call of duty ..I can no longer afford ultimate
I’m with the FTC on this one. The GamePass subscription is already a cash cow for Microsoft and now they want to make even more of a cash cow. They’re only milking people who are living in an already over priced world.
They’re not “milking people”. It’s a choice to subscribe and pay. If you can’t afford $20 a month, that seems like a bigger problem than what Microsoft is doing. Also, you want more value, but no price increase? That’s not how things work.
Increase in price but no increase in value is terrible on their part. But, they and their fans will justify it with CoD being available on gamepass.
Saying that 2 parts of a package is $20 and that is why they are increasing the price is dumb when there is a bundle that was $15.
That is like saying that if a burger is $5 and the fries are $5 but there is a bundle where you get both for only $7 that if you buy them you are going to spend $10, but now they are increasing the price of the bundle of burger and fries to $11, removing the cheese from your burger, removing the ability to buy them separately, charging you $2 more for cheese and telling the people that have been buying their product for years to get over it.
Tldr Microsoft is trying to gaslight people into believing it’s not a ridiculous price increase.
Im going to downgrade to the lowest tier, online without game pass option. Microsoft is out of their minds with this incredibly unaffordable price hike and adding games like fortnite duty do absolutely nothing for me. I cant even remember the last time they added a single game of value. They suck.
I’ve thought Microsoft to be the Greatest gaming company of all time up until this passed year. 60$ a year for Xbox live was perfect nobody needs gamepass but it was there if you had a little extra money. The combining of these 2 things is already greedy and now upping the price of something that never should have been combined in the beginning…… It’s slowly pushing me to either PC or to learn a PlayStation controller
I’m not bothered because they are letting you keep your current price if you already have ultimate they even confirmed they will grandfather the current users at 16.99/month but the price goes up if you cancel so…. Whats the problem?
They didn’t say that. Smh.
I find it funny how they forced everyone to have gamepass. I know alot of people were content with Xbox gold as it was. People were content to buy the games they wanted and play. Funny thing about greed the more you have the more you want.
You can still do that, you are free to pay full price for a game, no one is stopping you
Honestly they don’t have that many options to make the ultimate worth it. I have both systems. I paid for ultimate for awhile and just had so many more great options on psn. Game pass doesn’t do it for me. So many of their games are on psn and the ones not on there don’t seem worth having another subscription.
I can do without it bye ? gamepass.
The amount of people saying that an additional $36 a year is “incredibly unaffordable” just shows how awful people are with their money. Lmao, ya’ll need get yourself together instead of complaining about being broke.
The ftc is doing the right thing. A company making 72 billion net profit last year wants to raise prices after a huge buyout of activision sounds fishy. They try to call it inflation but that’s bs. You can’t say it’s inflation if you are literally raking money in fast and furious. It’s corporate greed pure and simple. And what happens when anti trust laws are destroyed. Going back to the Reagan administration. Monopolies ruin consumer protection and chances for small businesses to have a place. That’s all microsoft is one big monopoly. I already canceled ps plus years ago for the same reasons. I won’t reward behavior that hurts consumers.
Buying up companies is not the same as making your own in studio exclusives. Why would Sony fans care if xbox has exclusives anyway? You could go on and on about nothing. Cracks me up.
Microsoft is a joke when it comes to subscriptions. Charged 3x in one month for a single subscription then told they won’t refund the 2 extra charges because they refunded and canceled the original subscription that you have to then renew. They add trash to gamepass every month that most people don’t want and never play. Very very few games have been added in the last 3 years I enjoy and the last one I actually liked was grounded when it was first added years ago. They remove a lot of games and add them again later as “new to gamepass” instead of adding something new.
I actually purchased two upgraded monitors (it was definitely time) a desk for my gaming rig, a new headset to finally set up my PC as my main gaming center.
I’m cancelling gamepass altogether. I’ve been an ultimate customer for the past couple of years, but the fact that I need to pay just to play online games and the frequency of the price hikes. I’ll just buy games on steam and play online for no cost.
It’s really unfortunate, I loved my S so much I just got an X. I’ll still keep it around, but will slowly shift everything to PC.
My message to Microsoft/Xbox is, I really love my experiences playing with friends on gamepass, trying out new games, especially our boss runs on fallout 76. This last price hikes was my final straw.
So many cry babies in the comments
How cheap are y’all dang? HBO, Netflix and other services have went up. I doubt some of these commentators even have game pass. McDonald’s, Taco Bell, heck everything goes up and you’re crying about 3 dollars a month jeez. And SONY started the whole tier thing anyways wtf
20 might seem like nothing and to be honest, going up a few dollars makes sense from a business standpoint. They wanna make their money back to start making profits off the acquisition, I understand that. My problem is when you have yourself, a wife and 6 kids who play together. So that’s 8… 160.00 a month? At least offer a family plan. That would justify a slight price hike to me. But this reminds me of when Xbox first came out with live and you needed live to do ANYTHING online including watching YouTube or some other streaming. I wasn’t big on multiplayer until Xbox one came out and half of the kids were old enough to start playing online with us.
Xbox needs to quite raising prices because it makes it really hard for poor people to afford anything at all
If the trade off is for things like call of duty day one and if you’re already subscribed to game pass then it’s only 3$ increase a month, 36$ a year. In Canada call of duty costs 91$+. If we get call of duty every year I save almost two thirds every year because of the price increase and that’s not counting all the other games we’ll be getting. It’s cheaper for me to pay the increase and get the game than it would be with the other model.
I think everyone is forgetting something called “consumer choice”. You have a choice to buy or not buy a product. Nobody is forcing you to.
If you find that the price does not equal the value. You can choose to buy or not buy the product.
If more people choose not to buy. The company will reduce the price or change the product to try to bring value to the buyer and give you an easier choice to buy their product.
The real power you have and very few exercise is choice.
If you find you don’t like the value but still pay the price. You might be addicted.
If you don’t like the price or the value but still buy it despite your not wanting to, you might be purchasing out of envy, envy of what others have that you don’t, which then leads to a sense of loss.
All business in order to survive will do as the customer wants. It is only in the past 30 years that companies have enjoyed customers so desperate to feel any kind of joy, even if it’s from a dopamine surge from a purchase. They’ll cave and pay whatever is asked, they’ll grumble, but that’s all they’ll do. They’ll shout into reddit void rather than be effective and shout into the companies ear.
Just like we’re doing here.
What about Sony’s exclusivity of final fantasy 16? Isn’t that competition damaging? Huh. I would love to be able to purchase final fantasy 16 for xbox.
That’s not the same thing
I get that some people get mad. Before Ultimate gamepass, I paid $25. I had gamepass for $10, xbox live for $10, EA pass for $5 so then it when down to $15 when Microsoft bought EA so I saved $10. So now it’s going to $20 which is not a bad price. People get mad at Microsoft but still buy $8 Starbucks everyday day. Which is $40 a week and $160 a month which would there internet and gamepass bill and still cheaper then starbucks a month.
It’s still a price increase to make up for the $69 billion spent. Microsoft has to recoup that money somehow and perhaps their acquired assets didn’t do so fast enough or like they thought so, now the consumer has to pay for their overspending, compensate for their error.
Good on the FTC for backing the consumer and holding corporations accountable.