Well, have a seat. I’d like to buy you a cup of tea, but I can’t really do that through a screen, so I’m sorry. Now we’re here to talk about Xbox Game Pass, and we’ve had a little time to get our heads around the slew of changes to the service that Microsoft just announced. There’s a big question to get into, and it’s not what all this means for the future of Xbox and/or its place in the gaming industry.
The question is: are these changes and the revised hierarchy they encompass actually confusing? No, don’t just default to saying yes, we need to discern – once you’ve done the deep reading we all hate – whether they are still confusing, which is the true threshold of deception, a term I definitely didn’t invent.
Manage Cookie Settings
Let’s start with the game-changing new tier coming in September – Xbox Game Pass Standard. Basically, it’s the replacement for the current Game Pass for Console tier, and from today (July 10), the £8.99/$10.99 per month tier is no longer available to new users looking to join Game Pass. So if you already have it, you’re good to go for now, but once your current subscription expires you’ll need to switch to a different tier, and Microsoft has specified that codes for that tier will “continue to be redeemable until further notice.”
Once September 12th rolls around, though, the maximum extension period for Game Pass for console will be set to 13 months, so once that period is exceeded, you won’t be able to accrue subscriptions beyond that. Anyone currently queued for longer than that period shouldn’t be limited to specific extensions due to the upcoming restrictions, it’s just that you won’t be able to continue accruing 13 months after that magical date.
Back to the Standard Edition, the biggest difference between it and the console version of Game Pass is that the Standard Edition is more expensive at $14.99 (£11.99) per month and doesn’t include the launch-day content, which has always been a big selling point for Game Pass. While it does offer online multiplayer functionality across its library of games, it doesn’t have EA Play membership and Xbox Cloud Gaming, which, along with the launch-day content, are exclusive to the more expensive Xbox Game Pass Ultimate on the console side.
As part of this change, the price of Game Pass Ultimate has also increased – from $16.99/£12.99 per month to $19.99/£14.99. As for whether all games coming to Ultimate on day one will come to Standard later, Microsoft did not fully commit to doing so, but said that games not coming to Standard immediately “may be added to the library in the future.”
It’s quickly become Xbox Game Pass Core, which is essentially the same as the standard version, except it only promises “25+” games instead of “hundreds,” and its annual price has now risen to $74.99 / £55.99. It’s still £6.99 / $9.99 per month, though. For an at-a-glance look at all three tiers that will be available to console players from September, check out here.
However, PC gamers stand to benefit the most from these changes, as even if the PC Game Pass monthly cost rises to £9.99/$11.99, players will still get the launch game. So if you want to play Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 via Game Pass at launch, Ultimate and PC appear to be your only two options.
Finally, if you want to see the exact new prices in the currency used in your region, this document will cover it all.
So, as the fact that I just wrote a whole article about these changes and nearly gave myself a headache over it suggests, these changes might not be as complicated as you first thought. Prices are going up, day one launches are limited to a few tiers, and we’re all wondering why Xbox couldn’t do a better job coming up with tier names that don’t seem to imply similar things.
The world keeps turning, things keep getting more expensive, and we all get closer and closer to the sweet embrace of oblivion (not that one).
