I cancelled too! I really wanna see what excuse Microsoft will pull out to walk back the changes.
Hit 'em where it hurts, people.
I really appreciate this, you just saved me at least $20.
Microsoft’s user experience is awful at every step in a browser. I wanted to like XBox but it’s clear why they’re losing.
The price increase is absurd. I cancelled too, because while I do play quite a bit, this level of corporate greed is completely unjustifiable to me. If rather watch playthroughs of new games on Twitch or YouTube and then buy them a year later on sale than pay this bloody much, eff that.
“watch playthroughs of new games on Twitch of YouTube”
welcome to my life for the last couple of many years lol. Not that I’ve been boycotting per se, but I haven’t bought a new game in years cuz my laptop is over a decade old so the best I can play is minecraft, or just use my xbox one for battlefield 4. the corporate greed from the last decade has caused me to never buy this crap again. I love videogames so much, thank god for emulators.
I don’t need any trash EsaudiaA dishes out. People need to go play old/vintage games, get back to the roots, before games were nothing but meaningless cash grabs.
Just so you know, they only thought you were stupid enough to pay more because you were stupid to enough to pay at all.
Use your brain before your wallet. Start torrenting.
Stop being average.
To be fair it‘s as absurd as it was inevitable. Gamepass was always meant as this temporary thing you can try out to play some new games until everyone jumps ship because of increased prices. It has been preached for years. No one could‘ve seriously thought this was a long term alternative to buying games or at least buying licenses to games on Steam. All online subscriptions are scams in the process.
Why watch playthroughs at all? Just wait till the games are on sale. And only a year isn’t that long, wait more and get better deals with more complete games. There’s nothing saying you need to hurry in any way, and several things saying it’s a good idea to wait. There are more than enough games available for anyone to not have to constantly claw at the newest releases in any way.
Turned off my recurring billing. I’ll have about 3 months then it’s bye bye. I have been a customer since 360, but now will probably sign up for Playstation Network for the first time.
but now will probably sign up for Playstation Network for the first time.
Fucking hell… some people legitimately never learn.
They are destined to be suckers for life.
Oh I’m sorry, did Playstation start charging 30 bucks for their service? Oh, it’s actually CHEAPER than Xbox even was? Oh and it’s a massive back catalog of PS games I haven’t played due to being on Xbox? Fuck me right?
If you have a backlog of games that you have bought, why do you need an online subscription for them? Or am I misunderstanding something?
I don’t have a backlog of PS games due to mainly playing Xbox for the last 20 something years. That’s why subscription services can make sense, you play through games you’ve missed out on. Kind of like sub hopping for tv streaming, you build up a back log, sub for a few months then move to the next.
Ehh… PSN isn’t really any better. Their Game Pass competitor is a hot mess. Better to just buy games outright, especially during sales.
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I know it’s not better, but it has a bunch of the catalog from Game Pass as well as a bunch of PS titles I’ve missed while being on Xbox.
That’s a good callout - treating these game rental services more like we do with streaming video services by subbing to one for just a few months, then dropping it for another.
Yeah I was shocked at the overlap of titles between the 2. If I had noticed that the last price hike, I might have switched sooner.
The thing about this shit is…
Microsoft, like Google, is now a user-data driven company and they have already made loss/profit ratio analysis on this long before they released the price increase. They’re absolutely banking on people cancelling but making up the difference and then some from the people who stay.
For a thought experiment let’s consider how many subscribers they were reported to have in Feburary: 34 million. Let’s assume that everyone is paying for the highest tier to make the math easier. So current income would be 34 million user x $20 a month and thats $680 million a month. New income of 34 million users x $30 a month is $1.02 billion. The difference is $340 million a month. Let’s divide that by $30 a month. That gets us about 11,333,333 users. So they can hemorrhage over 11 million users and still break even. To make sure, let’s subtract 11 million users. That gives us 23 million users. 23 million users x $30 a month is $690 million a month, a cool $10 million a month above current profits.
For final context, 11 million users is roughly 32% of their entire subscriber count. They can afford to lose a third of the people subscribing and still make money.
The math doesn’t bode well for us who vote with our wallets.
One could imagine that conveniently, Microsoft’s online support pages and the amount of support staff were designed to only handle hundreds of thousands of cancelations at a time.
And it gets even better. Instead of up to 33% leaving, say 50% of that group convert to Premium instead of Ultimate. That isn’t any lost revenue since the price is going up to what Ultimate used to be. So that cushions their numbers even more.
Now factor in the cost savings from a lower server load and less staff to run the back end, and possibly the smaller licensing\use costs for the games available to play since less people would be accessing those games.
But also less new users and still the usual churn of existing users. It could be a downward spiral.
That’s the next CEOs problem.
Yes, but still something they will look at. It means when it becomes unviable with the squeeze already on, those that chose to pay the higher fees lose access to everything as they shut it down. I’m sure they will thank their loyal subscribers, so there is that.
My guess is they realise that xbox users in general is likely on a downward trajectory and now is the time to milk them.
I’m not a licensed math surgeon, but I think your math is wildly optimistic in favor of Microsoft due to how the subscription totals are actually distributed per price tier.
I don’t doubt that they did a lot of math to figure out an acceptable level of churn for this change, I just don’t think it’s nearly as generous and wide as you’re calculating.
There probably is a very real churn limit that they’re trying to avoid, and my hunch is that there exists a breaking point that could be hit with an aggressive and sustained boycott / cancellation spree, but again, I’m not a math surgeon so I could be wrong. That’s just my gut feeling.
Okay, but wouldn’t a higher price also discourage new people from subscribing in the first place? Or are companies that shortsighted?
Most of them are. Just make profit NOW!!
The same math is there too. They can afford to loose one third of new subscribers to get the same amount of money.
But their new customer acquisition cost wont get higher at the same pace and they get more valuable customers whose payback period will be shorter.
Also i dont think its relevant here, but less customers means less operating costs, so they will most likelly save some money on customer service and behind the scenes things like server upkeeps etc., but i dont think these make real difference here.
Also if for some reason things start to go bad they still have option to create “a budget version” for the people who see the normal subscrition as too expencive.
It’s nice they pulled this nonsense during a steam sale. Cancelled and picked up halo mcc and silksong.
silksong isn’t on sale.
Impulse purchase
A game, where depending on opinion, $20 is only $20.
It’s a pretty low price already, and I personally think the devs deserve it. Hope you enjoy!
Coming for the sale and leaving having bought a game not on sale is part of why sales exist!
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It was nice to have Xbox a month or two a year to play new releases. Guess that it’s over now, no problem, still a patient gamer.
EA also further buried the ability to cancel EA accounts, after the announcement they had been sold to the Saudis and Kushner.
To be fair, those kinds of changes do not usually happen so rapidly after a purchase, and was likely already planned for implementation and started before the sale.
In other words, it is likely EA was already planning to make that change regardless of if the sale went through or not.
Between that, this, and Disney+ cancellation page “accidentally” going down during that fiasco, this is exactly why I’ve switched to using only virtual cards for subscriptions. Pause/Cancel the virtual card, voila, no more subscription.
Good thing I never signed up for one.
Any Steam game that requires an EA, Ubisoft, Blizzard, whatever account is a total non-starter for me. I’ve looked at some of the newer Battlefields when they’re on sale for like $2 and I still can’t be convinced. Likely never will.
Ok with me, there’s lots of other publishers out there, both independents and studios, that I’d much rather give my $2 to.
they dont want SA or kushner to hold an EMPTY bag, but i suspect they will get alot of cancellations in the future. wish they seperate westwood so a proper CNC can be revived.
And Kyrandia!
Westwood, my beloved 😢
Would be good if Maxis also got out of their throes, though that’s extremely unlikely, given The Sims
Jfc I just downgraded back to Premium. We were paying for Ultimate but never used it. What a great way to force users to look at their subbed to. It’s pretty fucking awful to pull this shit with no real announcement.
For years I’ve been warning whoever would listen that XboxGP, much like any other content subscription service owned by a public company would inevitably lead to a massive consumer squeeze. Fortunately it happened before MS managed to metastasise into a monopoly in gaming too. Good riddance.
I already canceled because of the atrocities Microsoft does / is / supports.
Not that the harm hasn’t already been done, but I did just see this: https://thisweekinvideogames.com/news/microsoft-pulls-azure-services-from-israeli-military/
Thanks for sharing! Small wins!!
Know also that they did not really pull out completely. They are still there, but made sure to let everyone know they did something.
Oh, so it’s kinda for show.
Just canceled my 4 year old subscription. Can’t wait to hear the complaints from my kid but Netflix is likely next.
The missus and I sat down about a year ago and tabulated up how much all of the various streaming subscriptions were costing us per year (it was close to $1,000 when including YouTube Premium).
We cancelled every single one, and put that money towards building a home NAS and filling that up with downloaded media. No more ads, stupidly low bitrates, or TV shows & movies disappearing because a license expired.
The server has more than paid for itself at this point, and every additional spare dollar is being put aside for our kids’ tuition.
ETA: Consider doing the same, your kid’ll likely thank you in the long run!
PS: Never too late to introduce them to all of your favourite classic games, either - though that one may be a bit harder to get them onboard 🤣
I have a 16TB server and an extensive steam collection. I already explained it to him and he was fine about it.
Even better! What are you running on your server?
Ours is just an old QNAP I dug out of storage with 4x8TB drives in RAID5 - but am eager to try out HexOS on a proper system once I have some spare time.
Out of curiosity, what’s the electricity cost per month with your server running 24/7 now? Or do you schedule down time when its not in use. With all the datacenters poping up, electricity rates have gone through the roof, so looking at that, do you end up saving more still through this route?
I haven’t used a killawatt on it to check, but according to the specs it uses ~30W while in operation (plus whatever additional draw for the four drives). It’s pretty negligible, overall as far as I can tell.
It’s running windows out of convenience but I’ll be swapping to Linux soon.
Never too late to introduce them to all of your favourite classic games, either
Easier if you start with Bomberman Party on the PS1 or the arcade Neo Bomberman. I think those play much better than anything Bomberman released after 2004
If the kid enjoys strategy, starting out with Age of Empires should be easy. Or just leave them messing around with Settlers 2
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Getting users to pay extra for features that should already be included with their overpriced consoles is such a scam.
It’s the Microsoft way. They hide security features that should be standard behind higher subscription tiers. It’s entirely bullshit.
It’s all a scam.
It’s been a scam since the first Xbox where they charged people to play online.
The thing is, once they see dumbasses are willing to be scammed, they see no reason to stop there.
The only winning move is not to pay.
… and here is yet another opportunity I have to post the same comment as I have been doing for the past 6+ months:
People still use Microsoft products?!
Nope. Nobody uses them.
I literally cannot imagine why they would, and I used to work for them.
Hardly anyone does
Unfortunately the only music software I’m somewhat productive in runs only on Windows or Mac, and I really can’t afford Apple’s hardware prices. So it’s either using WIndows, or being very limited at a very dear creative outlet.
You can run most Windows programs on linux.
WINE/Proton.
I know, but DAWs are notoriously difficult to run and there are problems with most plugins.
Thats a fair point, DAWs are nightmares.
Hrm. I would offer a linux alternative, but I also know how people learn a DAW like an instrument and changing to a new would actually be quite an undertaking, and yeah, lots of various effects and such that… really only work that one specific way on your specific setup.
Your comment really just shout “i’m living under a rock!”
I think he’s just not an idiot like most of the people who are finally cancelling their subscriptions.
I know, it’s rare to find someone who isn’t eager to be ripped off.
Yep, me with my years of working for MSFT, playing their games, configuring their software and using it at large businesses… and then realizing its all fucking overpriced broken garbage from first hand experience, and then replacing it all with open sourcr shit both at home and at work…
Yep, I really am sound like live under rock.
Nobody care about your credentials though, your “people still use microsoft product” comment is the one that sounds like you’re living under a rock.
I canceled. I don’t want the features they added. I don’t even use all the features they charge me for now. I just want to be able to try out so new games every so often. I’ll take the $30 I save and buy those same games, probably with some money leftover
You should start using your brain instead of your wallet and begin torrenting.
For all the money you’ve wasted renting games with gamepass, you could’ve been owning them with a fraction of the cost of a VPN.
I understand, but I do want to support devs, especially indie devs, when u can. That’s why I have no qualms about canceling an expensive service and putting that money directly in their hands when it’s possible
