transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:08] Welcome back to Next-Gen Console Watch, our show following the latest gaming hardware. I'm Daemon Hadfield, and as always, I'm joined by Ryan McCaffrey, host of Podcast Unlocked, and Max Goville, host of Podcast Beyond. And last week, we were talking about the leaked internal memo where a new Xbox CEO, Asha Sharma, said Game Pass had become too expensive. It seemed like a price cut was on the way, but we didn't realize it would be so soon. Earlier this week, Xbox announced that effective immediately, the price of Game Pass Ultimate was being reduced from $30 a month to $23. It's a significant price cut, and kind of unprecedented for a subscription service, but still leads to cost $3 more than where it was before last year's huge increase. Up until last September, it was $20 a month. To offset this decrease, new Call of Duty games will no longer be included in Game Pass on day one. Activate the meme, oh no. Anyway, first off, Ryan, we talked about how a Game Pass price reduction was probably coming last week, but are you surprised at how soon it happened?

Speaker 2:
[00:58] I honestly am, yeah. I figured they would save this for a big announcement at the showcase, which is only, that's less than two months away. It's the first week of June there, so it's coming up quick. But hey, sooner's better. Rather be saving money now than have to wait a couple more months. So yeah, I mean, I give her credit for coming in. She's literally been on the job. She just tweeted this week, she had a picture of Kojima, I guess Kojima was in the office, and she said, oh, heck of a way to close out my first 60 days. So it's two months she's been on the job, and she's already dropped the price of Game Pass a good bit here. So we'll take it.

Speaker 1:
[01:37] I am one of the people that canceled last September, and I haven't subscribed back since. I was already planning to resubscribe next month for Forza, but now it's nice, I'll be paying $7 less. Max, how about you? Are you currently a Game Pass subscriber? Did you cancel last year?

Speaker 3:
[01:55] I got a long tail code for it. I still have it, but I don't know if it's coming out of my own pocket, if I'm going to stick with it. I would love if they just, again, if they introduced more tiers. I think removing Call of Duty is a great step in the right direction. But again, look at the wide net that they cast in terms of what's on there. They have the data of who's playing what and what kind of gamers are playing different types of games. Again, we're veering into that territory where an online subscription service starts to resemble cable TV a whole lot. But I would be kind of down if we got a customizable approach to Game Pass. I didn't touch Call of Duty on there. I have enjoyed Call of Duty in the past, but it was never a factor in Game Pass for me. It was always more about exploring smaller titles. So I'm glad that this is going down. But yeah, I don't think it's quite enough to move the needle. To be like, oh, this is the best deal again.

Speaker 1:
[02:58] Well, Ryan, it can't be lost on Microsoft that it is virtually unprecedented for a subscription service cost to go down. 99% of the time, numbers go in the other direction. In fact, the only two examples I could find of subscription prices ever going down were in 2019, when Netflix announced the price hike. And to counter it, Hulu announced a $2 decrease in its ad support tier from $8 to $6. And then if anyone remembers Movie Pass, that was at one time $40 a month, and they dropped it to just $10 a month, which very predictably crashed their entire business. So all this is to say, Microsoft has to be aware they're doing something no other subscription model does. What does this tell us? That they're desperate and they're flailing, or that they're serious and committed to getting Xbox back on track?

Speaker 2:
[03:41] Well, it's a little of the second one, but I think I would also point out that the no streaming service has probably ever jacked the rates up by 50 percent in one go. Normally, with Netflix every year, we're the frog in the slow boiling water. We're just like, this water is still pretty nice. It feels all right. A couple more, another dollar a month, another $2 a month. Okay. But Microsoft just took the boiling vat of water and just threw it, just dumped it on us and it was like, ah, that hurts, stop, make it stop. So they're, they may be the first to do a drastic price decrease like this short of movie pass. But they're, I think they're probably also the first to have tried to boil us, just tried to throw us in lava instead of slowly boil us. And that clearly didn't work. But yeah, I mean, for me, I think the optimistic outlook here is that this tells me that Asha Sharma is willing and empowered to make big changes. Because yeah, I mean, this is, in this capitalist society we live in, we are not accustomed to services like this going down in price, like you said, Daemon. So if she's willing and empowered to do this, that tells me that, well, maybe she can do the same on the console hardware prices, which are, we've talked at length about here, they're unsustainably high. I mean, it's horrific for future generations of gamers if console prices go nowhere but up. So that's the positive outlook I take away from this. The caution that I wanna mention is Call of Duty coming out, as Max said, it doesn't really affect me personally. I haven't played multiplayer in years. I do still enjoy the campaigns, but Call of Duty coming out in order for this to be seven bucks less a month, I'm personally all for it. But the question is, is that the exception or does that now open a whole new can of worms of like say when the next biggest thing Microsoft has coming, and I'm talking like stratospherically, like earthquake high magnitude big comes along, which would be the Elder Scrolls 6 in two or three years from now. Can I get that in any tier of Game Pass on day one? Or is that going to be separated out? And I need to pay 70 or whatever dollars for it. So that that would be the concern I have is that, you know, what does this open the door to?

Speaker 1:
[06:30] That is a good point. It's interesting. I'm also unaffected by removing Game Pass. Well, I am affected. It saves me money because I don't play Game Pass. But I thought it was interesting. $7 a month comes to $84 a year, which is the price of Call of Duty at launch with, you know, a battle pass or like a couple operator bundles or something. So it's not saving Call of Duty players who subscribe to Game Pass any money. I just thought that was interesting. So they seem to be the kind of losers in this scenario here. But I was saying last week, you know, putting Call of Duty in Game Pass didn't sell Xbox hardware or even increase subscriptions the way Xbox or Microsoft was hoping. I was saying that I think Call of Duty is just it's past its prime. You know, it was once predictably the best-selling game almost every year without fail. But in 2025, it was only the fourth or fifth best-selling game in the US. And true, millions of people were able to access it through their Game Pass subscriptions. But even on PlayStation Max, it didn't Call of Duty last year did not crack the top five on the PlayStation Store.

Speaker 3:
[07:29] I was surprised by that. Yeah, I am surprised too. I wouldn't surprise me to see Call of Duty decline in popularity, but to see such a sharp drop-off is a little bit shocking.

Speaker 2:
[07:40] There's Black Ops fatigue there though, I think. They've never gone back to back with the same sub-franchise before, to at least to my top-of-mind knowledge. And Black Ops 7 wasn't regarded super well, whereas 6 was. So I think that's a piece of this as well that can't be overlooked.

Speaker 1:
[07:57] Yeah, it'll be really interesting to see what happens with this year's Call of Duty, if it can sort of reclaim some of its market share. I don't think Call of Duty is going away, but instead of being like the thousand-pound girl in the room, they're kind of just one of the big players alongside Fortnite and Roblox and Minecraft and the others.

Speaker 2:
[08:16] If Rockstar doesn't delay again, GTA is going to be the number one selling game of the year for sure.

Speaker 1:
[08:24] It will, you're right about that.

Speaker 4:
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Speaker 1:
[09:51] Some people are still not super satisfied with this news. They're saying, you know, it's $23 now, which is still $3 more than it was last summer. So this is still a bad thing. Ryan, do you think that's a reasonable take or should people accept that the price, the price had to go up some amount?

Speaker 2:
[10:07] I mean, I don't begrudge them that. It's because it's true. Yeah, it's it's three bucks more a month. The way I look at it, which again, I'm not trying to defend a trillion dollar corporation here. But if if the price was going to go up, which it did last year, they obviously they pushed it too far. But I feel like it's it's at a price now at 23 bucks a month, which is that's what they should have raised it to last year if they were going to do a price increase. Just do it do it in smaller doses, hopefully over longer periods of time. Yeah, I mean, if if they turn around in 2027 and up the price again, it's it's going to start to we're going to start to feel the same like, I don't know about this if this is worth it. Like clearly the next move or at least the next price increase whenever that is. I hope it's not next year. I hope it's further out, but they're going to go to 25 next because that's like a big kind of more round number of sorts. I don't think they're going to go right back to 30 or even to 27. I think 25 is the next stop. But but yeah, it is still three bucks more a month now than it was. And if that's everybody has their their breaking point, right? Like I canceled Disney Plus a couple of price increases ago. And now I just dip back in on a month to month basis here and there when there are seasons of shows like right now. I'm in there for Daredevil. But yeah, it's there will come a point for all of these services. I'm about there with Netflix, quite honestly. Like they keep what do they do? Two or three price increases over the last year. And so, yeah, Microsoft is going to be subject to that, just like everybody else, where if some people might be out now at 23, even after coming back down to 23, and some people might dip out at 25, if and when it goes there. So, yeah, we'll see what happens.

Speaker 1:
[12:09] So a year of Game Pass Ultimate is now $276. Max, I can't even keep the PS Plus tiers straight. What's like the highest tier of PS Plus call? And do you know what its annual cost is?

Speaker 3:
[12:22] OK, so there's PlayStation Plus Premium. That is the Game Pass Ultimate comparison, I guess. And that is, honestly, I just looked it up myself because it's hard to keep track. It's not the most compelling tier names. But yeah, Premium is $159.99 for a 12-month subscription, or $17.99 a month. And again, this is the one that gives you access to cloud streaming. You get game trials. You get to pay for some demos. I think that's cute. But you do also get access to a bunch of classics. You get a bunch of the newer game library. Once in a while, you get a brand new game that premieres on there, but there's not much fanfare for that, which that's the thing that bugs me about PlayStation Plus. But I think also probably the thing that's working in their favor is that we've had so many eyes on Game Pass because they came out swinging, and they were like, everything is day one. You get everything day one, and it's a great deal. It's the best deal in gaming. And then, oh, by the way, you bought all these other studios, and those are now Microsoft Studios, which means that you now get Call of Duty day one, which is they just kept escalating this thing. And we're talking about fluctuating Game Pass prices. I don't think we've had a PlayStation Plus price go up in a minute. And if it did, there's still the baseline, old school, essential, 10 bucks a month. You get a handful of new games every month, you get access to cloud storage and online gaming, and it's the bare bones one. But I'm almost nostalgic for the days of a $10 subscription to anything. I mean, remember the early days of Netflix when it was still a thing where you would mail away a DVD or whatever, and then they had the ability to watch movies in a browser? And that was when, again, subscriptions were single digit charges, and now it's completely out of control. It's exorbitantly expensive. And I guess there are other options depending on what medium you're looking at. But at the same time, everyone's kind of just in these ecosystems. You've kind of become accustomed to this service. And so they raised the price. And to Ryan's point, yeah, we're frogs in boiling water, with the rare exception when, you know, Xbox comes along with a big pot full of freshly boiled water to dump on us.

Speaker 1:
[14:35] Well, so, Ryan, if we assume this price decrease is happening because the increase last year caused a mass cancellation event, do you now expect Xbox Game Pass subscriptions to go back up?

Speaker 2:
[14:48] Eventually, sure. I mean, it's that's again, we live in a capitalist society that this is the way, whether we like it or not. But the good news is we can at least vote with our wallets and we can still just buy games individually. It just, you know, for everybody, it comes down to are they getting enough of a value for themselves out of that service? And for me, I'm super lucky that I get to have, I can justify Game Pass Ultimate as part of my job at even when it was 30 bucks a month. But there is a point where it's like, if you're looking at your bank statement every month and you go, I don't know, am I really getting 30 bucks a month out of Game Pass? And clearly a lot of people said no. And yeah, I would have been in that group, for sure. Now, 2023, it's like, yeah, it seems that I'm back in, if I would have dipped out. But the real, I think that we're talking about this on Unlocked this week, the MVP to really look at is for the growing PC audience, remembering that everything Microsoft publishes, all their first-party stuff hits PC day and date. PC Game Pass got a price decrease too. It's not really getting the headlines as much as this ultimate price decrease is. So PC Game Pass went from $16.50 a month to $14 a month. So you know, smaller decrease. But if you've got a capable gaming PC, $14 a month, and you're getting everything except Call of Duty, that Microsoft puts out on day one, that's a pretty sweet deal if you've got the PC to properly enjoy this stuff. So that would be my advice for anybody that's either looking at PC gaming or already is a PC gamer.

Speaker 1:
[16:53] Ryan, you put up an op-ed this week saying that this price decrease is a step in the right direction for Xbox. Okay. So what should be next? How do they keep the momentum going?

Speaker 2:
[17:02] For me, there's two other big things that Asha Sharma needs to figure out or take a look at and make some sort of change on. One is hardware prices. We've talked about that extensively here. And I know that the cost of hardware is a different animal than the cost of your internally developed subscription service. There are external forces at play with hardware prices. But for years, for basically forever, up until recently, these console manufacturers would take a loss on hardware in the early parts of generation as the costs kind of caught up and came down. And so I don't know how much money Microsoft spends to make an Xbox Series X or Series S. But if Asha Sharma is serious about doing the thing that she said in her introductory memo to the public and to internal staff about sort of returning to Xbox, those are paraphrasing her words. Well, the best way to do that is to make it more affordable. So I would love to see, I paid 500 bucks in 2020 for the Blu-ray Drive Series X. Okay, I'll meet you slightly in the middle. I would love to see the digital Series X, the one terabyte digital model, down to 500. That would be, and again, forget about what Sony is or isn't doing, because right now, yes, Sony is the same, I would say all this to Sony too, but since we're talking about Microsoft, they've got to get the hardware prices down. And then the other thing that she's got to figure out and make some sort of decision on is exclusivity, because Nintendo has long defined exclusivity. You will not play our games anywhere except on our devices unless you go all the way back to like the Zelda games on the CD-i back from our youth. And Sony has now kind of done the same. If they're ending their first party PC game publishing experiment and pushing everybody back to the console space. And Microsoft, I don't even know what the hell exclusivity means for them. When you've got some games that are exclusive for a year, some for like four months, some are day and date, and it just there's no consistency to it at all. So I don't know which way she'll go. I don't know if she'll just say, we don't have exclusives ever, period, or everything is exclusive for a year, or something in between. But I think she needs to figure that out as part of this sort of return to Xbox.

Speaker 1:
[20:05] Well, I do agree with you that knocking $7 a month off the price is a step in the right direction. Feels a little bit more palatable to me. But viewers, listeners, we want to know if you canceled Game Pass after the price increased last year, will you resubscribe to Game Pass now, Game Pass Ultimate in particular? Make sure to vote at ign.com the day this episode goes live. You can also vote on Spotify if you watch the video there. We'll share the results with you next week. Just like we had the results of last week's poll, we asked what April game are you most excited to play? And the winning result was none of them. None of them, you're just excited for the big May games. But the first game to win would be Pragmata, which I'm enjoying quite a bit. That's a very fun sort of throwback video game. Followed by that, it was Mouse PI for higher, replaced Tomodachi Life and Windrose, which is in early access. Some of our fans pointed out that we missed, we failed to include Saros on the list, and they're right. Yep, we forgot about that one. But Max, that's the next big release from PlayStation. Are you excited for Saros?

Speaker 3:
[21:03] I'm curious. I didn't get into Returnal so much, and I'm not typically a roguelike sort of person, but I am thrilled to get a nice PlayStation exclusive game to jump into and really see what they do with those haptics and that hard drive and really make it look pretty.

Speaker 1:
[21:17] Yeah, I'm excited. I'm looking forward to that one. Ryan, are you still playing Replace, or have you finished it?

Speaker 2:
[21:22] I'm in the middle of it. I'm quite enjoying it, and then I want to get to Mouse PI for Hire, which I've snuck a couple missions into and I'm enjoying, but yeah, I got to get through these because like we said in the poll, May is going to be absolutely crazy in the best of ways. Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[21:38] I know I just said I don't like roguelikes, but I want to shout out one that's on Game Pass Ultimate, which is Vampire Crawlers.

Speaker 1:
[21:43] I'm going to start that tonight.

Speaker 3:
[21:46] It's dangerous. It's got those hooks.

Speaker 1:
[21:49] I'm excited for that one. Ryan, in another timeline, we're only a month away from GTA 6 before it was delayed.

Speaker 2:
[21:57] Yeah. Well, at least we've got a whole bunch of other games that actually are coming out in May to look forward to.

Speaker 1:
[22:03] That's true. Something else to look forward to, tickets are officially on sale for IGN Live 2026. The two-day celebration of gaming and entertainment will take place June 6th and 7th, Downtown LA. It will be filled with celebrity panels, exclusive game reveals, live stage shows, giveaways and much more. Early board tickets are on sale now on Show Clicks. Fans can purchase one-day tickets for 15 bucks or a weekend pass for 30. That's our show. Thank you to both Ryan and Max. Thank you to everyone working behind the scenes to make this show possible. My name is Daemon. We'll be back next week with more of the latest gaming hardware. We'll see you then. This episode of Next Gen Console Watch was produced by Daemon Hadfield, Jobert Atenza and Sam Claiborne. Daemon is also the host, and Max Scoville and Ryan McCaffrey serve as regular panelists. Technical Direction is by Jobert Atenza, with Technical Production by Morian Franzen and Amir Raqib. Audio Engineering is handled by Amir Raqib. Post-production Editing is by Jobert Atenza, and Graphic Design is by Justin Vachon. Next Gen Console Watch is an IGN Production and part of the Geek Media Network.