The Federal Trade Commission recently expressed some objections to the recent Xbox Game Pass price increase, but Microsoft unsurprisingly disagreed.
Earlier this month, Microsoft finally pulled the trigger and announced that it would be raising the price of Xbox Game Pass. This was likely in part due to lackluster subscriber growth and the fact that it did spend a ton of money on Activision Blizzard earlier this year (after all, that Call of Duty money had to go somewhere). But the Federal Trade Commission, which tried to block the acquisition last year, recently made some comments about the price hike, calling it a “product downgrade.” Those comments were part of a recent FTC filing with the U.S. Court of Appeals that claimed Microsoft “exercised market power post-merger,” and unsurprisingly, in its response to the filing, the tech company flatly disagreed.
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In a letter to the court, via Tom Warren of The Verge, Microsoft claims the FTC has “put additional misleading facts on the record, a continuation of the agency’s attempt to reshape its case on appeal.” It also argues that it’s unfair to call the new Game Pass Standard tier a “‘downgrade’ version of the discontinued Game Pass for Console product” because it doesn’t offer “multiplayer functionality.” For Game Pass Ultimate, it also argues that “the service will provide more value by delivering many new games ‘daily,'” particularly Call of Duty, which it notes has “never been previously offered on a daily basis with a subscription.”
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Microsoft’s letter ends by saying that the FTC “barely mentioned the subscription issue at trial, instead focusing on the theory that Microsoft will keep Call of Duty off Sony consoles,” which is clearly not true (at least not for the next 10 years). We’ll obviously have to wait and see what happens with this filing, but in the meantime, if you still find the new Game Pass tiers confusing, we can at least give you reassurance.
