Xbox lowered the price of Game Pass after losing "millions of users"

Xbox has given the best conference of the Summer Game Fest, presenting an interesting lineup of games for its near future, but that doesn’t seem to be enough to regain the faith of its fans. Or of gamers in general. Being the third player in the game for two generations now, they are having very serious problems positioning themselves as serious competition against Sony and Nintendo, even with their missteps, and it seems that even their successes are more reactions than anything else.

A business with serious problems

Matthew Ball has spoken with Chris Dring, head of the specialized video game newsletter The Game Business, about the situation that Xbox is currently facing. Highlighting some of the challenges and issues the brand is experiencing. The first of these is that, both in Spain and the US, there is no stock of Xbox Series. This is something Ball has addressed without hesitation.

“I can definitively say that the demand for our console exceeds the supply. We are bringing it to as many stores as possible, and we are producing it as quickly as we can. There is a serious limitation on how fast we can do this.” Although this does not translate into the number of console sales, which remains far lower than those of Sony and Nintendo, it seems to also be related to the issue of rising component prices, which is forcing them to ‘rethink everything we can about Helix’, their next console.

More relevant is that the price increase of around 50% for Game Pass caused them to lose millions of subscribers. This has forced Asha Sharma, since she took her current position as CEO of Xbox, to lower the price of Game Pass with a serious commitment: to remove Call of Duty from the service at launch.

All of this reveals a contradictory picture of Xbox. Although Ball constantly tries to assert that Xbox is better than ever and in a winning position, all it conveys is that the company is constantly reacting to questionable decisions they themselves have made in the past. Without an apparent clear roadmap, which includes the inability to define which games will be exclusive to Xbox and which will not and why, the brand’s fans remain marked by the uncertainty of a company that, although it claims to be more transparent now, still is not at all.

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