Xbox lost “millions” of Xbox Game Pass subscribers following the massive price hikes that were announced in October 2025, the company has now admitted.
Speaking at The Game Business Live today (as noted by GameSpot), Xbox’s new chief strategy officer Matthew Ball said, “We shed millions of subscribers over the span of a few months,” following the jump in price from $20 to $30 per month for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate.
This was one of the last significant acts under the previous leadership of Xbox, and following Phil Spencer stepping down, one of the first major policy changes that new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma made was to lower the cost of Game Pass Ultimate again, bringing it back down to $23 a month. That’s still a bump, but Ball says “the value has changed.”
The primary reason for that price increase, we can reasonably speculate, was that Xbox had added Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 as a day one game for Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass in late 2024, hoping to spur on a fresh batch of subscribers. That announcement already heralded a price increase and Game Pass Standard losing day one game access. A year later, in advance of the same for Black Ops 7, the price increased by a whopping 50% with the token inclusion of Ubisoft+ and Fortnite Crew subscriptions.
Microsoft has not divulge subscriber counts in a long time, but claimed 34 million subscribers for Game Pass across all tiers in February 2024. This included the base level of Game Pass Core (now Game Pass Essential) which is required for online play in paid games and has a significantly smaller library of games than other higher tiers. The LinkedIn page of an Xbox program manager then leaked a 35 million subscriber figure in mid-2025, but again, we don’t know the breakdown of tiers.
Either way, losing “millions” from those counts would be a significant dent, and many of them would likely have come from that highest priced tier, adding weight to their departure. Is the $23 per month price bringing all those people and more back to the subscription service? We don’t know right now, but it would at least go some way to levelling off the subscriber count.
via GameSpot
