The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is just as mad about the Xbox Game Pass pricing changes as you are, and has made it official.
In a letter filed Thursday, FTC lawyer Imad Abyad wrote that Microsoft had not only increased prices for established tiers but had created a “degraded product” with a new Game Pass Standard tier. This lower tier will cost $15 per month (for reference, the Ultimate tier costs $17 per month at the time of writing), and won’t provide new day-one games.
“Product degradation — removing the most valuable games from Microsoft’s new service — combined with price increases for existing users, is exactly the sort of consumer harm from the merger the FTC has alleged,” Abyad says.
Abyad also alleges that the company is doing so to exercise “market power” in response to the Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 being made available on Xbox Game Pass day one.
This might sound familiar if you were following the battle between the FTC, which was trying to block the Activision Blizzard acquisition, and Microsoft. One of the key talking points in the FTC’s case was Call of Duty — specifically whether making the series Xbox console exclusive was anti-competitive against Sony, which also brought up the franchise in its arguments against the merger.
Microsoft said, however, that it had signed deals with other companies like Nintendo and Sony to offer the game on those platforms. It also said the argument made little sense as blocking it or degrading the product on other services would go against making the newly accquired Microsoft property as widely accessible as possible.
The FTC has been keeping an eye on Microsoft since the acquisition finalized in late 2023. After the company laid off 1,900 employees in January, Abyad argued that the move contradicted claims it made in court. “Microsoft reportedly has stated that the layoffs were part of an ‘execution plan’ that would reduce ‘areas of overlap’ between Microsoft and Activision, which is inconsistent with Microsoft’s suggestion to this Court that the two companies will operate independently post-merger,” Abyad wrote. However, Microsoft said the layoffs were pre-planned before the deal went through.
Many players didn’t like the Xbox Game Pass price hikes either. Not only did Microsoft make its tiers more complicated to parse but the new tier removes arguably the service’s marquee selling point — day-one games. While the changes were inevitable to industry experts, it represents a turning point for the service. Will it continue to operate as it has, or will people cancel their subscriptions en masse once they play the new Call of Duty?
