The page to cancel your Xbox Game Pass subscription on Microsoft's website was overwhelmed shortly after today's price hike went live.

I cancelled too! I really wanna see what excuse Microsoft will pull out to walk back the changes.

Hit 'em where it hurts, people.

  • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    1272·
    2 个月前

    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.

    • ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      2·
      2 个月前

      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.

      • hitmyspot@aussie.zoneEnglish
        2·
        2 个月前

        But also less new users and still the usual churn of existing users. It could be a downward spiral.

          • hitmyspot@aussie.zoneEnglish
            1·
            2 个月前

            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.

    • Jakule17@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      2 个月前

      Okay, but wouldn’t a higher price also discourage new people from subscribing in the first place? Or are companies that shortsighted?

      • MrFinnbean@lemmy.worldEnglish
        11·
        2 个月前

        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.

    • ramble81@lemmy.zipEnglish
      24·
      2 个月前

      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.

    • quackerjo@lemmy.wtfEnglish
      141·
      2 个月前

      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.

    • Rentlar@lemmy.caEnglish
      32·
      2 个月前

      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.

  • moakley@lemmy.worldEnglish
    7·
    2 个月前

    I’m usually fine with paying more for things I enjoy that are worth it. Like $70 games are just not a big deal to me.

    I’m also too lazy to cancel most things. I’ve ignored Game Pass price hikes before and justified them by thinking of all the games I played without buying.

    But this one is just ridiculous. There’s no value here, no way for me to justify it. I was enjoying Silksong on Xbox because I didn’t have to buy it, but now that I do have to buy it I guess I’ll do that on my Switch instead. Replaying it is going to be rough, especially without my Elite controller.

    I hope Microsoft gets their shit together, because Xbox has been my favorite game platform for years.

  • mintiefresh@piefed.caEnglish
    33·
    2 个月前

    It’s honestly cheaper to just buy games than pay this subscription per year.

    Plus, you get to keep the games.

  • mrfriki@lemmy.worldEnglish
    10·
    2 个月前

    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.

  • bblkargonaut@lemmy.worldEnglish
    541·
    2 个月前

    It’s nice they pulled this nonsense during a steam sale. Cancelled and picked up halo mcc and silksong.

  • rumba@lemmy.zipEnglish
    19·
    2 个月前

    Knowing Microsoft, I’d like to thing that it went down like this:

    Pardon me, your department isn’t achieving the expected 20% annual revenue increase.

    But we’re just selling subscriptions to games that cost us nearly nothing. It’s free money.

    And you need to make more money from it, increase your subscriber count or your costs, or we’ll cut your staff.

  • Voytrekk@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    33·
    2 个月前

    I haven’t subbed to gamepads for years because I knew this would eventually happen. Gamepass was designed to get people used to not purchasing games and instead letting them come to them. Subscribers now have to chose between paying even more each month or losing access to the library of games available to them.

    • SippyCup@lemmy.mlEnglish
      8·
      2 个月前

      I learned after a few months of game pass that most of the games that looked interesting actually weren’t. It’s no big loss, and it’s cheaper to just buy the few games I actually want anymore. Doubly true now.

    • thoro@lemmy.mlEnglish
      13·
      2 个月前

      Gamepass only ever made sense to people who had time to play or dabble in a sufficiently large amount of games per year and felt the need to play some new titles soon or immediately instead of waiting. Otherwise, eventually your total subscription costs would outpace the total cost to purchase what you played, especially if purchased on sale at a later date. And the value gets worse if you ever replayed a game (s).

      I’ll never really understand the excitement about this service. It was always a Trojan horse.

      • TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        2 个月前

        Gamepass only ever made sense to people who had time to play or dabble in a sufficiently large amount of games per year

        Exactly. I only played two games before unsubscribing. You have to have so many free time to make the gamepass worth your while and money.

      • sadfitzy@ttrpg.networkEnglish
        2·
        2 个月前

        Gamepass only made sense if you’re an idiot.

        Everyone who isn’t stupid knew that they were renting access to something they could be getting for free. The business can raise fees whenever it wants, and you’re stuck either paying the higher rates or cutting your losses and having nothing to show for the money you wasted.

        Renting is a scam and only morons think otherwise. Hopefully some of them grow up after seeing this, but I doubt it.

  • Glide@lemmy.caEnglish
    412·
    2 个月前

    You know, fundamentally, I don’t hate Gamepass as a concept. “Netflix, but for videogames” is an idea I can get behind, as it widens the audience for something I love by lowering the bar of entry. There are plenty of people out there that benefit from being able to play a few games here and there without needing to commit hundreds of hours to $100 purchases.

    But Netflix has overstepped with price hikes and ads, and I’ve cancelled my service with them. That Microsoft thinks it can charge some ~$40CAD a month is pure hubris. I hope they learn quickly that, at that price point, the enthusiast market will happily cancel and just buy their games outright, and the casual market will decide it’s an expense they don’t need.

  • doingthestuff@lemy.lolEnglish
    30·
    2 个月前

    Between the cost of housing and the cost of food, and the fact wages aren’t that much better than they were 15 years ago - you’d think they would realize they are asking for the scraps people have left.

    I’ve always just bought games when they’re on a good sale, I’ve never had a game pass type thing. But maybe they just want to squeeze a bit more out of their most loyal customers and they’re accepting that it is a dying model.

    • Prox@lemmy.worldEnglish
      27·
      2 个月前

      Once upon a time, the idea with subscriptions like this was to have customers set it and forget it. Charge them a small/reasonable amount and they’ll keep giving you money forever. Giving people a reason to think about - or worse, evaluate the merits of - the monthly deposit they’re giving you used to be a sin for companies.

      But here we are, seeing the difference between “companies” and “corpos”.

      • AppleTea@lemmy.zipEnglish
        3·
        2 个月前

        …is the difference being publicly traded on the stock exchange? The only company I can think of that doesn’t fall under “corpo” is Valve, and it seems to mostly be because they don’t have to answer to shareholders.

        • Prox@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          2 个月前

          I mean “corpos” in the Cyberpunk sense - mega-huge companies that put profits far and above all else, discarding any notion of ethics, morality, or care about others in the process.

          They’re the companies that buy up emerging tech solely so they can kill it (their competition). They don’t give a shit about long-term sustainability - if it raises the bottom line today, they do it. They disregard laws and consumer protections because the only consequences are paltry (for them) fines, which they see as the cost of doing business.

  • Arcane2077@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    121·
    2 个月前

    Netflix Spotify Disney and Amazon proved that price hikes are effective at increasing profits even despite the loss of subscribers. Capitalism baby.

    I think the only time collective cancellations actually hurt one of these companies was that time Jimmy Kimmel made fun of the president and it took an estimated 1.7M ex-Disney Plus subscribers.

    • cmhe@lemmy.worldEnglish
      51·
      2 个月前

      Maybe, but in the Kimmel case there could have been other reasons too. Like Hollywood people not wanting to make business with a company that would just cancel contacts when they have opinions on public. Disney needs those people, arguable more than subscribers.

      IMO, consumer boycotts don’t really work in general, here it might have worked, but it is also possible it worked for other reasons.

      • Arcane2077@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        2·
        2 个月前

        Consumer boycotts are pretty much the only strategy guaranteed to work, the only exceptions being Facebook and Google, as they’re the only businesses I can think of that are both primarily B2B, and can operate on speculative liquidity

    • unhrpetby@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      4·
      2 个月前

      It can be if you buy from stores, such as GOG and Itch, that provide DRM-free downloads of games. Even Steam, depending on the game.