Xbox Game Pass may be offering a “pick your own” plan in the future, as a way for subscribers to customize their experience on the subscription service. Finding the right balance of content and price point on Xbox Game Pass could be a major task, and putting that control into players’ hands may provide the boost Microsoft’s gaming brand needs.
The subscription service lost a lot of public respect in October 2025 after the monthly price of an Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription rose to $30, effectively raising the cost passed on to players by 50 percent. This major price hike was coupled with the addition of access to a ton of new games, including a bunch of Assassin’s Creed titles and other entries from the Ubisoft+ catalog, but it wasn’t enough to stop a wave of cancellations that crashed the subscription page’s servers.
Xbox Game Pass Membership Plans Could Become Much More Customizable
Half a year later, Xbox Game Pass Ultimate has received a big price cut, with its monthly fees reduced to $22.99, in an attempt to win over many of the customers that were previously lost via the October decision, and plans for making the subscription service more affordable may not stop there. As reported by Jez Corden of Windows Central, unnamed sources inside the Xbox team have indicated that a “pick your own” plan is being considered, offering more options than just the standard tiers of Essential, Premium, and Ultimate. Code names for additional tiers reportedly include “Duet” and “Triton,” and while it’s unclear exactly what they could offer, there are a lot of possibilities for services that customers could choose to include or leave out of their personalized plans.
Some of the items that may be on the table for customers to choose from relate to general gaming services. For example, Xbox Cloud Gaming is currently accessible to all Game Pass subscribers, but under the new plans, players may potentially be able to leave it out of their subscription to save a little bit of money. Other items in the discussion are tied to individual games, meaning subscribers may be able to leave off the bonuses granted by game-specific services like Fortnite Crew, which provides Fortnite players with additional content, premium Battle Passes, and a regular supply of premium in-game currency.
One other topic of discussion centers around day-one Xbox Game Pass games, and how much value they hold for subscribers. Traditionally, all first-party Xbox games are made available to Ultimate-tier subscribers at launch, but one caveat to the recent decrease in price is that Call of Duty games will be excluded from the day-one appearance rule. Simply cutting out one franchise from this deal has allowed the price to go down almost to where it had been prior to the increase in October, and it’s questionable whether any other games or series may be on the chopping block or left as an option for customers.
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Much of the praise for the recent price decreases has been attributed to new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma, who took over following Phil Spencer’s retirement on February 23. Earlier in April, a leaked memo from Sharma stated Xbox Game Pass prices were too expensive, telling employees that the brand needed to come up with a plan to make the price point more attractive to gamers. Part of this memo hinted at transforming Xbox Game Pass “into a more flexible system which will take time to test and learn around,” which may indicate that plans for customizable subscriptions are already in the works, but that Xbox fans may have to wait until the powers that be have found the right formula.
Source: Windows Central
