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Microsoft is about to hike Game Pass up again, with the price of Ultimate tier increasing by 50%. Many subscribers are ditching the service altogether, but Xbox is doubling down.
It felt a little too good to be true, didn’t it?
Game Pass has ensured, amid a lingering cost-of-living crisis, that gamers have remained well fed and on budget. For the reasonable price of £14.99 a month, we’ve had access to first party releases on day one, as well as a constantly updating library of hundreds of games.
This favourable circumstance is about to shift dramatically, however. Game Pass Ultimate is now priced at £22.99 per month, meaning players will have to shell out an extra 50 percent of their wages (or pocket money) to avoid being ousted from their current offering.
It was only last year that Microsoft increased the price of Game Pass Ultimate with no added benefits, but they’re touting better bang for our buck this time around. To alleviate the sting of the initial announcement, Xbox quickly rolled out 45 new games on Ultimate including Hogwarts Legacy, Assassin’s Creed titles, and a whole bunch of Ubisoft content literally nobody asked for.
On that note, the coup de grace of this new Game Pass is apparently Fortnite Crew and the game’s Battle Pass – complete with 1,000 V-bucks each month – starting in late November. For those of us who gave up on Fortnite before IShowSpeed hit puberty, however, there’s not much to cling onto apart from vague improvements to Xbox Cloud Gaming and the promise of ‘more’ games than before.
The End Of Xbox Game Pass pic.twitter.com/ndWFkRGQRL
— Evangelicos (@centralnerv_) October 1, 2025
Reaction to the news has gone about as well as you’d expect. The Game Pass cancellation page crashed due to the sheer number of users frantically trying to hit the eject button, and daily cancellation requests have apparently tripled. On X and Reddit, folk are proudly sharing screenshots of their break ups with Game Pass en masse, like a max prestige badge on Call of Duty.
What’s most striking is how rapidly the sentiment flipped. Game Pass has been the poster child of value for money for years, standing out as a platform that offered vastly more than it took. In the last year, I’ve personally relied on the service heavily, playing Doom: The Dark Ages, Expedition 33, Oblivion Remastered, and most recently Gears of War: Reloaded nigh-on back-to-back.
Now, it appears to be living up to its initial ambition of becoming the ‘Netflix of games’… and that’s not a good thing. In-fact, it actually costs more than Netflix each month as a service, as well as its main rival PlayStation Plus (at £13.49 for Premium).
