After reducing its price by removing Call of Duty from the offer, it seems Microsoft now wants to reform Game Pass altogether through offering a “pick your own plan” deal to gamers. According to rumors, Game Pass could soon let you choose what you want to have included in your plan, allowing for flexible and custom costs.
This is according to Jez Corden, who, citing Microsoft sources, claims that Game Pass is going to be reformed down the line after its price was slashed following the removal of CoD from the day one program. “Microsoft sources tell me that the longer-term goal for Xbox Game Pass is to make it more flexible,” he claims, adding that “a sort of ‘pick your own plan’ formula for Xbox Game Pass is on the cards, essentially, where users can effectively decide what packages of content they want to see as part of their plan.”
Through this, Game Pass users would essentially drop and pick up select features from their plan, allowing them to tailor it to their own needs and wants instead of being “forced” to pay for that stuff they don’t usually use. As Corden says, one could remove cloud gaming from the offer to lower the price while keeping the rest, or exchange it for some day one games, or tack on other bonus subscriptions on top like Netflix, without changing the cost too much. It’d be a flexible way of approaching the subscription model, which many major corporations seem very interested in these days.
Under chief executive Asha Sharma, Xbox seems to be going through a much-needed overhaul. While we do not know where that’ll end up, these first moves by this new leader seem rather promising. Xbox Game Pass price hikes were a major controversy whenever they happened, and at nearly $30 per month, it really didn’t seem like a worthwhile investment. Now, Game Pass is at $22.99 per month for the Ultimate tier, and having more cost-effective options will certainly do wonders for the subscription.
In fact, Sharma confirmed Xbox is working to increase the flexibility of Game Pass in a post about a new Discord partnership, but she did not share much else about these purported changes, nor what future plans might entail.
Either way, we’ll have to wait and see. Game Pass is an excellent option on paper, but how it’s been executed hasn’t always produced the best results. More choice and buyer freedom are always welcome, and I hope that we’ll see some of the stuff above implemented on some level down the line.
