Won what exactly?

Instead of achieving their goals (moving more people to game pass and/or increasing revenue from those sticking to gold) they now effectively made gold more expensive for them (set a higher expectation for the free games) while removing the F2P barrier, thus less people will get gold.

Basically moving away further from making Gamepass viable long term, or rather expediting having to increase GP subscription fees.

So far it seems only Nintendo has figured out how to make a profit in the gaming business, while Sony (barely) manages to break even and MS keeps on investing into potential profits later on. Great for gamers right now, enjoy the golden age while it lasts.


There's no defense for the nearly doubling the price like the initial plan was. But you have to wonder what will come next. Such a move comes from somewhere, and having not achieved those goals, some other way will be found.

Won what exactly?

Instead of achieving their goals (moving more people to game pass and/or increasing revenue from those sticking to gold) they now effectively made gold more expensive for them (set a higher expectation for the free games) while removing the F2P barrier, thus less people will get gold.

Basically moving away further from making Gamepass viable long term, or rather expediting having to increase GP subscription fees.

So far it seems only Nintendo has figured out how to make a profit in the gaming business, while Sony (barely) manages to break even and MS keeps on investing into potential profits later on. Great for gamers right now, enjoy the golden age while it lasts.


There's no defense for the nearly doubling the price like the initial plan was. But you have to wonder what will come next. Such a move comes from somewhere, and having not achieved those goals, some other way will be found.

They wanted to increase price but gamers complained so they didn't and now F2P don't need gold anymore. It seems they reacted (fast) it feels a win for gamers and not a loss.  If they kept the price it would have been a loss.

Some people will probably never move to GamePass and will just continue to pay for Gold to access multiplayer. It's cheaper than GamePass, so why should they pay more for something they don't use. It wasn't a good idea not matter what the initial plan was.

I'm just saying it's merely a stay of execution. The F2P unlock was merely meant to soften the blow of the price increase, however the ridiculous increase caused so much backlash that MS had to reverse that decision asap and still do the F2P unlock to win back goodwill.

It's been in the works for a long time, back in July MS discontinued the 12 month digital subscription and those will likely disappear from retail as well. They were meant to disappear next week but I guess now simply as long as stock lasts.

All those cheap upgrade plans are there to get people to convert to GP. I guess it wasn't going fast enough or is stagnating, hence the price increase of Gold to get more people to move to GP.

This 'win' is not going to change those plans. MS is a business after all, not a service running on tax payer money.

Of course they want our money (what else could it be?) but yesterday they learned that the Xbox fanbase is not as forgiving as other fanbases out there, so now they're gonna have to come up with a less intrusive way to get our money.

Lol, yeah that's why paying for online has become the standard on consoles!

You can complain about Nintendo's HW and pricing all you want, however they have a sustainable business model while Sony had to resort to selling off buildings in the PS3 era and MS just keeps pumping in money hoping game pass will become an Office 365 cash cow.

I sure as hell want them to keep pumping in money. It works for me. You can feel free to keep enjoying Nintendo's business model if that's what works for you.