Xbox just made Game Pass Ultimate cheaper while taking something away in the hullabaloo of it all.
As of April 21, your Game Pass Ultimate subscription now costs just $22.99, down from $29.99 per month, and PC Game Pass membership prices have also been reduced from $16.49 to $13.99 per month.
The ‘but’ here is that starting this year, upcoming Call of Duty games are not going to hit Game Pass at launch. New titles will instead arrive during the holiday season of the following year, roughly 12 months after release.
Everything already in the library will stay available to current subscribers, including existing CoD titles.
Why did Microsoft make the trade-off?
Call of Duty is one of the best-selling franchises in gaming. Putting it on a subscription service at launch is expensive, and Microsoft has been pretty open about that fact, noting how Game Pass economics are complicated.
The price cut suggests that the $29.99 fee was doing more damage to user numbers than the company would like to admit. Pulling CoD launch access is presumably how they offset it.
Microsoft is positioning the change as a response to player feedback, pointing out how subscribers come from a wide range of regions and have different priorities.
For most Game Pass users, the library is extensive enough that one franchise shifting its release window would not do much. With hundreds of games, cloud streaming, online multiplayer, and day one access on releases outside of CoD, the value case for $22.99 a month is perhaps stronger now than it was last week for the average gamer. But for the Call of Duty crowd, that’s a harder sell.