Microsoft recently announced that Xbox Game Pass Ultimate is climbing from the sweaty price of $20 US per month to an eye-watering $30. The “real” gamers around the internet already have a joke for it: “Xbox 360 dollars per year.”
But while the jokes write themselves, determining if Game Pass is still of value to me at this new price has taken far more energy. Yes, the company has also added new incentives and moved some features around, but do these additions create value, or just even more confusion? Let’s break things down a bit.
Currently, Xbox Game Pass Ultimate includes access to all Microsoft-published games–as well as many other titles–on their respective release days. It also includes a subscription to EA Play, Ubisoft Classics, and will soon include Fortnite Crew. With Ubisoft Classics coming in at $80 per year, EA Play at $40 per year, and Fortnite Crew at $144 per year, the total value of these subscriptions is $264, which definitely helps sweeten spending $360 a year on Game Pass–if you actually use them.
Let’s talk about the subscriptions that come with Ultimate and what they mean. First, there’s Ubisoft Classics. If you look at the Ubisoft Classics website, the standard subscription tier costs $7.99 per month, but only offers PC play. Ubisoft Classics’ Premium tier, however, features both PC and Xbox play for a total of $17.99 per month. Xbox claims that its version of Ubisoft Classics adds $7.99 per month of value per platform, meaning those playing on both PC and Xbox receive the greatest benefit. With the Game Pass version of Ubisoft Classics, you get access to a rotating menu of games in their standard editions rather than the 100-plus games–often in their Premium editions–that are promised in Ubisoft Premium. You’re getting access on PC and Xbox, yes, but to a smaller library of games, in Standard editions instead of Premium. Microsoft wants you to think of this as a $15.98 value each month, but with all these caveats, it’s hard to take the quoted “$7.99 a month per platform” value seriously.
EA Play, meanwhile, is more straightforward. Through EA, the subscription costs $5.99 per month and offers 10-hour trials on new games and “unlimited access to a collection of top EA titles,” and it seems as though that’s what Xbox Game Pass Ultimate is offering as well.
However, in their standalone versions, both of these programs offer discounts on Ubisoft and EA games respectively; there’s no word on whether those discounts would apply to Game Pass subscribers. We’re guessing they won’t, though, because as part of the price increase, Xbox also eliminated the game and DLC discounts that previously were included as part of the service.
Fortnite Crew is a bit more complex. If you stay subscribed to Fortnite Crew all year long, you gain access to all battle passes all year, and receive 1,000 V-Bucks per month (12,000 total in a year) and 12 sets of unique Fortnite Crew outfits. But while this might sound like a good deal, even if you play a lot of Fortnite, it still isn’t worth the value. That’s because not all the rewards you get for being a Crew member are created equal–Fortnite battle passes and Crew rewards are full of throwaway items you probably won’t care about to fill out their offerings. These rewards mostly aren’t the cool genre-bending collaborations like Scooby-Doo or Power Rangers, they’re generic, non-copyright-infringing characters and songs.
You’d have to love the Crew outfits, use the Jam Tracks, and play LEGO Fortnite modes–along with completing the Battle Passes–to really get your money’s worth. The short version is that Fortnite Crew is $144 for about $100 worth of V-Bucks, some skins you probably won’t use, some LEGO pieces you probably won’t use, and Jam Tracks that you may or may not even care about.
Regular Fortnite players (myself included) will often buy a Crew Pass to complete a season’s Battle Pass and earn the corresponding bonus V-Bucks. But as an ongoing subscription, you have to be extremely invested in Fortnite to justify Crew on its own merits.
Now, when speaking purely in terms of Microsoft-published games, Game Pass admittedly makes a pretty strong case for itself. This year alone has brought us Avowed, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Doom: The Dark Ages, and Gears of War Reloaded, and I’d be remiss not to mention that Ninja Gaiden 4, Call of Duty Black Ops 7, The Outer Worlds 2, and Keeper are all just around the corner. This also doesn’t include the various third-party games that come to Xbox Game Pass on Day One–games like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and Hollow Knight: Silksong. But again, the exact “value” here is subjective–you’d have to play a lot of those games for the math to actually add up.
Coincidentally, a study published by Circana shortly after the Game Pass price hike found that most US game players purchase two or fewer new games a year. Sure, there is a lot of nuance to this statistic, but at the same time, when the majority of gamers report they spend around $140 a year on new games, does the average player truly find value in spending $360 a year just to temporarily gain access to a handful of them?
It’s also worth noting that we can’t rely on Microsoft to release that many games next year or the year after. It might happen, but again, we’re talking about potential value.
To get the greatest value out of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, you’d almost have to use it to the exclusion of other gaming services, and that’s not how the majority of gamers are using the service. Personally, I tend to like Microsoft-published games; by the end of the year I’ll have played five of the above Microsoft-published games, along with a bunch of other third-party Game Pass games. I also play Fortnite a lot and tend to play games on my Xbox rather than my PlayStation. I’m one of the rare cases that can maybe justify that “Xbox $360” price tag. But even then, I hesitate.
In earlier days, Game Pass felt like a steal: You only had to play one or two games to justify the cost. Everything else was just gravy. With this price increase, though, the math becomes far more complex–to the point that it feels like you’re talking yourself into giving your wallet to a guy who says he’ll definitely bring it back and not to worry. And if that doesn’t get you, the changes and transient nature of the service will.
Game Pass was the best deal in console gaming. Now, it’s a deal in console gaming–but only under very specific circumstances.