Microsoft announced a significant price-drop for Xbox Game Pass yesterday, reducing the price for the Ultimate tier from $30 to $23, with the catch that the package would no longer include any day-one Call of Duty releases. Now Windows Central‘s Jez Corden (who accurately predicted this very move a couple of weeks back) is reporting that even more major changes could be coming, with customers able to build their own Game Pass packages based on their specific interests.
The loss of Call of Duty from Xbox Game Pass Ultimate is going to hit different people very differently. For avid CoD fans, it’s a gut-punch. For everyone else, it’s a combination of “phew” and “shrug.” But as ever with such things, it’s worth looking for patterns rather than incidents: What might be cut next? Is Ubisoft Classics safe? How about access to the EA Play vault? Might that Fortnite Crew subscription go away in a month or two? Things are so up in the air that we can’t be sure of anything, and if Jez Corden’s latest rumors are true, it could be about to get even more involved. The claim is that Game Pass could become “more flexible,” which is to say we’ll be able to pick and choose from these various aspects and create our own plan with its own resulting, bespoke price. Which could be great, or, you know, be dreadful for everyone. Corden explains the rumored system as one “where users can effectively decide what packages of content they want to see as part of their plan.”
Microsoft has leaked “Duet” and “Triton” codenames for Xbox Game Pass via its back-end APIs recently, suggesting that packages of services are in the plan’s future. Don’t want Xbox Cloud Gaming? Remove it and lower the price. No need for Fortnite Crew? Ditch it and add day one Xbox games. Perhaps you can roll in World of Warcraft or Minecraft Realms subscriptions instead, or even other benefits like Netflix, per rumors, or the long-awaited Xbox Game Pass Family Plan.
CoD Farming
2025’s dramatic price hike for Game Pass, seeing the cost increase by a whopping 50 percent overnight, was a moment of shock for Xbox gamers. The “best deal in gaming,” which gave folks access to a massive library of games along with every Microsoft-published game at launch, had two price increases in 2023 and then truly started to sour in mid-2024 with new, confusing tiers and pricing structures that reduced the quality of the service at all lower price points. By the end of 2025, with that massive rise in cost for the sake of including Call of Duty, the enshittification appeared complete. What was once a bizarrely good deal for those who picked Xbox over PlayStation had become a punishingly expensive and convoluted mess. That’s something new Xbox chief Asha Sharma appears to have heard and is now responding to.
Two seemingly contradictory things appear to be true for Microsoft, with Game Pass both cannibalizing sales of new Call of Duty games and failing to bring in enough money-spending CoD players to have made the inclusion profitable. However, it makes some sense that those who might casually check out the games via the subscription rather than risking $70 on a game they might bounce off of would also be the sorts to not go on to buy battle passes and skins. Clearly Microsoft’s internal numbers have told them that it’s not working, and so the move has been retconned, with the massive advantage to non-CoD players of a 23-percent monthly price drop.
But what if you’re not interested in sports games and could also cut out the EA Play vault access for more savings? That’d be neat, right? Or maybe you’ve never played Fortnite in your life and the Crew sub is money out the window every month. I would so love a way to be able to craft my Game Pass so it gives me the mix of brand new indies and big-name games along with the splendid back catalog, but without needing to pay for all the Ubi and EA games every single month. I love that Vampire Crawlers is available for me to play today, and while I’m installing it I’ll likely check out a AA game I’d never heard of before that got added too. That’s what brought me into the service in the first place, along with ways to find the perfect, say, platformer for a Sunday afternoon from its archive. But I don’t need every NHL and NBA 2K, and I couldn’t care less about the CoD series any more.
Pick-Your-Own
What I envisage is a far more reasonably priced version of how Amazon Prime Video works right now. (It’s not a perfect example, because Amazon is working so hard to enshittify that service, too, with its hateful extra payment to remove ads and paywalling 4K.) The way APV works at the moment is you pay for the base service as part of Prime, and then can tack on extras like MGM+, Shudder, or Discovery for an extra fee.
So take the current Premium pack (200+ catalog of games, new Xbox-published games within a year of release) and then let you pick from any of the bits and bobs that appear in Ultimate. Day-one releases, Fortnite Crew, EA Play, Ubisoft+ Classics, and anything else anyone wants to get in there. I’d be delighted to pay a couple more bucks on top of the base fee for access to Devolver’s back catalog, for instance. It would also allow for adjustments on the fly, such as adding in Ubisoft+ for a month when you’re having a Far Cry craving, then dropping it when you’re done. That’s pretty much how I use Prime, bundling in Discovery during the Olympics for instance, or re-adding MGM+ when I want to see the new season of From.
Of course, this could be done in the worst way possible, and given Microsoft’s last few years that seems threateningly likely. It could break the Ultimate tier into pieces, and then have the resulting parts cost more when put back together, or start pulling out more and more features and charging for them whenever it wants a boost. Suddenly we could see online multiplayer is now a $5 tier rather than a basic feature, now that the infrastructure is in place to easily do that. (This particular example is unlikely given the massive backlash it would cause, but hey, it’s Microsoft!)
Still, there is at least a path to a better deal this way, with the usual options for the super-rich to just bundle in absolutely everything, but ways for everyone else to cut down costs based on what it is they actually want from Game Pass. Get that right, and it could even find its way to returning to The Best Deal In Gaming.
