I cancelled too! I really wanna see what excuse Microsoft will pull out to walk back the changes.
Hit 'em where it hurts, people.
Pro financial tip: Be a patient gamer. Get the games you are interested in during sales. Fuck FOMO and pre-orders.
Shortly After Xbox Game Pass Prices Spiked, the Page to Cancel Game Pass Subscriptions Was Overwhelmed
Submitted 1 day ago by SalamenceFury@lemmy.world to games@lemmy.world
https://wccftech.com/xbox-game-pass-subscription-cancel-page-overwhelmed-after-game-pass-price-hike/
Comments
Macaroni_ninja@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Guitarfun@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Lately, I’ve only been buying indie games. I can’t drop $70-$80 on one game and even when those games go on sale they’re usually $40-$50.
If you read reviews and do a little research you’ll find that there are actually a lot of really cool indie games and you can multiple games for just a fraction of the cost of double or triple A games.
Landless2029@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
I always preferred waiting a year for AAA games. Patches, mods, guides and sales.
Even better when GOTY editions or bundles with all the DLC on sale.
zanyllama52@infosec.pub 18 hours ago
Word. Just give me a completed game that is mostly bug free and has all features that are alleged to be part of the game on release.
ibot@feddit.org 22 hours ago
I agree. But if you are on a console and want to play online, you already need a subscription.
I want a subscription free Console that supports online play.
ltxrtquq@lemmy.ml 20 hours ago
That’s just a computer. If you’ve heard about the steam deck, you can set up a pc to be basically the same but more powerful and permanently hooked up to a tv.
ICastFist@programming.dev 19 hours ago
I want a subscription free Console that supports online play.
Sorry, best we can do is a PC or phone
Regrettable_incident@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Yeah, I’ve got so many more games than I have time to play them that there’s never a need to play full price for anything. I wishlist em and pick them up when they’re on sale less than £10
Macaroni_ninja@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
Exactly. My limit is also under 10 eur for most games on my wishlist, or 20 eur for games Im interested the most.
garretble@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
Honestly, I’ve kinda gone back to buying physical media.
I bought DK Bananza on cart, and guess what? After I finished it, I gave it to my brother. Imagine that! Sharing a game you own? Madness.
I’m eager to pick up Ghost of Yotei from the store this afternoon, as well.
zanyllama52@infosec.pub 18 hours ago
I’ve never gone away from buying physical media, but I could understand exactly why you would want to return to it.
garretble@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
For me, when the Switch 1 came out it was just nice to have everything on the device and you never had to do the most heinous thing of taking a moment to put a cart into the device.
But more and more I buy one to two games a time and focus on those, so that issue is largely not a thing any more.
mintiefresh@piefed.ca 17 hours ago
It’s honestly cheaper to just buy games than pay this subscription per year.
Plus, you get to keep the games.
voytrekk@sopuli.xyz 22 hours ago
I haven’t subbed to gamepads for years because I knew this would eventually happen. Gamepass was designed to get people used to not purchasing games and instead letting them come to them. Subscribers now have to chose between paying even more each month or losing access to the library of games available to them.
thoro@lemmy.ml 20 hours ago
Gamepass only ever made sense to people who had time to play or dabble in a sufficiently large amount of games per year and felt the need to play some new titles soon or immediately instead of waiting. Otherwise, eventually your total subscription costs would outpace the total cost to purchase what you played, especially if purchased on sale at a later date. And the value gets worse if you ever replayed a game (s).
I’ll never really understand the excitement about this service. It was always a Trojan horse.
TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
Gamepass only ever made sense to people who had time to play or dabble in a sufficiently large amount of games per year
Exactly. I only played two games before unsubscribing. You have to have so many free time to make the gamepass worth your while and money.
SippyCup@lemmy.ml 21 hours ago
I learned after a few months of game pass that most of the games that looked interesting actually weren’t. It’s no big loss, and it’s cheaper to just buy the few games I actually want anymore. Doubly true now.
rumba@lemmy.zip 18 hours ago
Knowing Microsoft, I’d like to thing that it went down like this:
Pardon me, your department isn’t achieving the expected 20% annual revenue increase.
But we’re just selling subscriptions to games that cost us nearly nothing. It’s free money.
And you need to make more money from it, increase your subscriber count or your costs, or we’ll cut your staff.
Randomgal@lemmy.ca 17 hours ago
Then they cut staff anyways, because why leave free money on the table?
doctortofu@piefed.social 1 day ago
The price increase is absurd. I cancelled too, because while I do play quite a bit, this level of corporate greed is completely unjustifiable to me. If rather watch playthroughs of new games on Twitch or YouTube and then buy them a year later on sale than pay this bloody much, eff that.
CosmoNova@lemmy.world 1 day ago
To be fair it‘s as absurd as it was inevitable. Gamepass was always meant as this temporary thing you can try out to play some new games until everyone jumps ship because of increased prices. It has been preached for years.
M137@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Why watch playthroughs at all? Just wait till the games are on sale. And only a year isn’t that long, wait more and get better deals with more complete games. There’s nothing saying you need to hurry in any way, and several things saying it’s a good idea to wait. There are more than enough games available for anyone to not have to constantly claw at the newest releases.
Scotty_Trees@lemmy.world [bot] 19 hours ago
“watch playthroughs of new games on Twitch of YouTube”
welcome to my life for the last couple of many years lol. Not that I’ve been boycotting per se, but I haven’t bought a new game in years cuz my laptop is over a decade old so the best I can play is minecraft, or just use my xbox one for battlefield 4. the corporate greed from the last decade has caused me to never buy this crap again. I love videogames so much, thank god for emulators.
I don’t need any trash EsaudiaA dishes out. People need to go play old/vintage games, get back to the roots, before games were nothing but meaningless cash grabs.
whereyaaat@lemmings.world 1 day ago
Just so you know, they only thought you were stupid enough to pay more because you were stupid to enough to pay at all.
Use your brain before your wallet. Start torrenting.
Glide@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
You know, fundamentally, I don’t hate Gamepass as a concept. “Netflix, but for videogames” is an idea I can get behind, as it widens the audience for something I love by lowering the bar of entry. There are plenty of people out there that benefit from being able to play a few games here and there without needing to commit hundreds of hours to $100 purchases.
But Netflix has overstepped with price hikes and ads, and I’ve cancelled my service with them. That Microsoft thinks it can charge some ~$40CAD a month is pure hubris. I hope they learn quickly that, at that price point, the enthusiast market will happily cancel and just buy their games outright, and the casual market will decide it’s an expense they don’t need.
bblkargonaut@lemmy.world 1 day ago
It’s nice they pulled this nonsense during a steam sale. Cancelled and picked up halo mcc and silksong.
copd@lemmy.world 1 day ago
silksong isn’t on sale.
samus12345@sh.itjust.works 18 hours ago
Coming for the sale and leaving having bought a game not on sale is part of why sales exist!
LavaPlanet@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
I already canceled because of the atrocities Microsoft does / is / supports.
PKscope@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Not that the harm hasn’t already been done, but I did just see this: thisweekinvideogames.com/…/microsoft-pulls-azure-…
LavaPlanet@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Thanks for sharing! Small wins!!
W3dd1e@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
I canceled. I don’t want the features they added. I don’t even use all the features they charge me for now. I just want to be able to try out so new games every so often. I’ll take the $30 I save and buy those same games, probably with some money leftover
whereyaaat@lemmings.world 1 day ago
You should start using your brain instead of your wallet and begin torrenting.
For all the money you’ve wasted renting games with gamepass, you could’ve been owning them with a fraction of the cost of a VPN.
W3dd1e@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
I understand, but I do want to support devs, especially indie devs, when u can. That’s why I have no qualms about canceling an expensive service and putting that money directly in their hands when it’s possible
wesker@lemmy.sdf.org 1 day ago
EA also further buried the ability to cancel EA accounts, after the announcement they had been sold to the Saudis and Kushner.
other_cat@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
Between that, this, and Disney+ cancellation page “accidentally” going down during that fiasco, this is exactly why I’ve switched to using only virtual cards for subscriptions. Pause/Cancel the virtual card, voila, no more subscription.
hydrashok@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Good thing I never signed up for one.
Any Steam game that requires an EA, Ubisoft, Blizzard, whatever account is a total non-starter for me. I’ve looked at some of the newer Battlefields when they’re on sale for like $2 and I still can’t be convinced. Likely never will.
Ok with me, there’s lots of other publishers out there, both independents and studios, that I’d much rather give my $2 to.
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 1 day ago
they dont want SA or kushner to hold an EMPTY bag, but i suspect they will get alot of cancellations in the future. wish they seperate westwood so a proper CNC can be revived.
ICastFist@programming.dev 19 hours ago
Westwood, my beloved 😢
Would be good if Maxis also got out of their throes, though that’s extremely unlikely, given The Sims
SlartyBartFast@sh.itjust.works 23 hours ago
And Kyrandia!
RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.world 1 day ago
To be fair, those kinds of changes do not usually happen so rapidly after a purchase, and was likely already planned for implementation and started before the sale.
In other words, it is likely EA was already planning to make that change regardless of if the sale went through or not.
doingthestuff@lemy.lol 1 day ago
Between the cost of housing and the cost of food, and the fact wages aren’t that much better than they were 15 years ago - you’d think they would realize they are asking for the scraps people have left.
I’ve always just bought games when they’re on a good sale, I’ve never had a game pass type thing. But maybe they just want to squeeze a bit more out of their most loyal customers and they’re accepting that it is a dying model.
Prox@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Once upon a time, the idea with subscriptions like this was to have customers set it and forget it. Charge them a small/reasonable amount and they’ll keep giving you money forever. Giving people a reason to think about - or worse, evaluate the merits of - the monthly deposit they’re giving you used to be a sin for companies.
But here we are, seeing the difference between “companies” and “corpos”.
AppleTea@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
…is the difference being publicly traded on the stock exchange? The only company I can think of that doesn’t fall under “corpo” is Valve, and it seems to mostly be because they don’t have to answer to shareholders.
Siegehammer85@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
I work in the IT software licensing industry, it’s a fucking cancer I can’t wait to fail so bad that when we have the first extended internet outage failure so bad that it shows the world that subscriptions are a liability that shouldn’t exist
VerilyFemme@lemmy.blahaj.zone 22 hours ago
Buying isn’t owning, but it has to be better than this…
unhrpetby@sh.itjust.works 17 hours ago
It can be if you buy from stores, such as GOG and Itch, that provide DRM free downloads of games. Even Steam, depending on the game.
RunJun@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
Just canceled my 4 year old subscription. Can’t wait to hear the complaints from my kid but Netflix is likely next.
thatKamGuy@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
The missus and I sat down about a year ago and tabulated up how much all of the various streaming subscriptions were costing us per year (it was close to $1,000 when including YouTube Premium).
We cancelled every single one, and put that money towards building a home NAS and filling that up with downloaded media. No more ads, stupidly low bitrates, or TV shows & movies disappearing because a license expired.
The server has more than paid for itself at this point, and every additional spare dollar is being put aside for our kids’ tuition.
RunJun@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
I have a 16TB server and an extensive steam collection. I already explained it to him and he was fine about it.
ICastFist@programming.dev 19 hours ago
Never too late to introduce them to all of your favourite classic games, either
Easier if you start with Bomberman Party on the PS1 or the arcade Neo Bomberman. I think those play much better than anything Bomberman released after 2004
If the kid enjoys strategy, starting out with Age of Empires should be easy. Or just leave them messing around with Settlers 2
whereyaaat@lemmings.world 1 day ago
Nice.
You wasted hundreds of dollars and have nothing to show for it.
You are average!
zanyllama52@infosec.pub 22 hours ago
Never would I ever subscribe to a game service. That’s just me.
altima_neo@lemmy.zip 20 hours ago
I justified it as a games rental. I mean I easily paid $5 to rent a game for the weekend in the 90s. Paying 12 bucks to rent games all month long wasn’t bad (for PC).
But the price they’re charging now, I may as well buy the games I do play, rather than paying for the subscription. The problem for Microsoft is that money is gonna be going to steam instead of them.
mrgoosmoos@lemmy.ca 18 hours ago
you wouldn’t? not if the cost and convenience was right? just out of principle, regardless of value?
I could see doing it if I had more time to game
zanyllama52@infosec.pub 18 hours ago
I don’t feel good about not having the ability to do what I want with my games; the idea of games being “mine” goes away if I cannot buy, sell, resell, loan, copy, backup, modify or destroy it.
I’m not sure how a digital gaming subscription service can compete with that no matter how cheap or how good the library is or how long the service is proposed to exist.
ibot@feddit.org 22 hours ago
I just bought 12 month of Ultimate on eBay. I always did this in the past, because it’s cheaper than buying directly from Microsoft. So far, I made good experience with it.
The way it usually works is, that you get a few codes you need to redeem. I got three codes for 36 month of EA Play and then one code for Ultimate that is supposed to transform the EA Play subscription to 12 month Ultimate. But due to the the price hike, the subscription transformation changed as well and I did not get the 12 month.
I’m now in contact with the seller and he tries to find a solution. I want to have my 12 month Ultimate that he offered for the price. But it also sucks for the seller. Seems like we both didn’t know. He basically sold it to cheap. I paid 150€ for 12 month Ultimate and he just now increased the price to 200€.
The new prices are insane! 150€ a year is already my upper limit. I’m not gonna pay 200€ or even more a year. I think, if my new subscription is over, I will not extend it. I like the idea of Game Pass, but that’s to much money.
The thing is I really like Game Consoles. I want to play in front of my TV. I wish, Steam would make another Steam Machine with Steam OS. I do want an all in one solution. The last thing I want is a gaming PC. I hope, alternatives to Xbox Consoles and Playstation come up.
I know, I could also use the XBox without GamePass, but I do play online something and it would be nice to get away from subscriptions completly.
calliope@retrolemmy.com 1 day ago
I really appreciate this, you just saved me at least $20.
Microsoft’s user experience is awful at every step in a browser. I wanted to like XBox but it’s clear why they’re losing.
verdi@feddit.org 1 day ago
For years I’ve been warning whoever would listen that XboxGP, much like any other content subscription service owned by a public company would inevitably lead to a massive consumer squeeze. Fortunately it happened before MS managed to metastasise into a monopoly in gaming too. Good riddance.
wetbeardhairs@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
Now is probably not the best time to sell my xbox… I bet the market is flooding
OddMinus1@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Just cancelled mine. I have barely been doing ~2 games per year, and the cost was low enough for me to not really care about the months I didn’t play at all.
But a price increase is the straw.
SoftestSapphic@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Getting users to pay extra for features that should already be included with their overpriced consoles is such a scam.
Ffs xbox live used to be free -_-
_AutumnMoon_@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
I have never had gamepass, it just seemed like a waste honestly
etchinghillside@reddthat.com 1 day ago
Internet is being shitty on link. What is the price increasing to/from? When was the last increase?
Gerudo@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
Turned off my recurring billing. I’ll have about 3 months then it’s bye bye. I have been a customer since 360, but now will probably sign up for Playstation Network for the first time.
moakley@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
I’m usually fine with paying more for things I enjoy that are worth it. Like $70 games are just not a big deal to me.
I’m also too lazy to cancel most things. I’ve ignored Game Pass price hikes before and justified them by thinking of all the games I played without buying.
But this one is just ridiculous. There’s no value here, no way for me to justify it. I was enjoying Silksong on Xbox because I didn’t have to buy it, but now that I do have to buy it I guess I’ll do that on my Switch instead. Replaying it is going to be rough, especially without my Elite controller.
I hope Microsoft gets their shit together, because Xbox has been my favorite game platform for years.
vladmech@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I’m doing my part!
mrfriki@lemmy.world 1 day ago
It was nice to have Xbox a month or two a year to play new releases. Guess that it’s over now, no problem, still a patient gamer.
Omegamanthethird@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
Oh, they got rid of the 12 month core plan and changed it to essential (isn’t essential the basic playstation plan?).
I guess I won’t buy more than 1 month at a time for multiplayer. That’s going to save me a lot of money, since I don’t play xbox online very often.
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
The thing about this shit is…
Microsoft, like Google, is now a user-data driven company and they have already made loss/profit ratio analysis on this long before they released the price increase. They’re absolutely banking on people cancelling but making up the difference and then some from the people who stay.
For a thought experiment lets consider how many subscribers they were reported to have in Feburary: 34 million. Let’s assume that everyone is paying for the highest tier to make the math easier. So current income would be 34 million x $20 a month and thats $680 million a month. 34 million x $30 a month is $1.02 billion. The difference is $340 million a month. Let’s divide that by $30 a month. That gets us about 11,333,333. So they can hemorage 11 million users and still break even.
The math doesn’t bode well for us who vote with our wallets.
Rentlar@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
One could imagine that conveniently, Microsoft’s online support pages and the support staff were designed to only handle hundreds of thousands of cancelations at a time.
ramble81@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
And it gets even better. Instead of up to 33% leaving, say 50% of that group convert to Premium instead of Ultimate. That isn’t any lost revenue since the price is going up to what Ultimate used to be. So that cushions their numbers even more.
quackerjo@lemmy.wtf 1 day ago
I’m not a certified math surgeon, but I think your math is wildly optimistic in favor of Microsoft due to how the subscriptions are actually brokendown per price tier.
I don’t doubt that they did a lot of math to figure out an acceptable level of churn for this change, I just don’t think it’s nearly as generous and wide as you’re calculating.
Jakule17@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
Okay, but wouldn’t a higher price also discourage new people from subscribing in the first place? Or are companies that shortsighted?
Minnels@lemmy.zip 17 hours ago
Most of them are. Just make profit NOW!!
ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day ago
Now factor in the cost savings from a lower server load and less staff to run the back end, and possibly the smaller licensing\use costs for the games available to play since less people would be accessing those games.