I cancelled too! I really wanna see what excuse Microsoft will pull out to walk back the changes.
Hit 'em where it hurts, people.
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.
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.
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
It’s honestly cheaper to just buy games than pay this subscription per year.
Plus, you get to keep the games.
It’s even cheaper to torrent them.
And you actually get to keep them.
Pro financial tip: Be a patient gamer. Get the games you are interested in during sales. Fuck FOMO, subscription models and pre-orders.
I always preferred waiting a year for AAA games. Patches, mods, guides and sales.
Even better when GOTY editions or bundles with all the DLC on sale.
Lately, I’ve only been buying indie games. I can’t justify dropping $70-$80 on one game and even when those games go on sale they’re usually $40-$50.
If you read reviews and do a little research you’ll find that there are actually a lot of really cool indie games and you can get multiple games for just a fraction of the cost of double or triple A games.
Be a smart consumer. Don’t pay for things you could be getting for free just so the business can have a nicer campus.
If it’s a major release, wait until the game is finished and then torrent it.
Word. Just give me a completed game that is mostly bug free and has all features that are alleged to be part of the game on release.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But also less new users and still the usual churn of existing users. It could be a downward spiral.
That’s the next CEOs problem.
Okay, but wouldn’t a higher price also discourage new people from subscribing in the first place? Or are companies that shortsighted?
Most of them are. Just make profit NOW!!
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.
Honestly, I’ve kinda gone back to buying physical media.
I bought DK Bananza on cart, and guess what? After I finished it, I gave it to my brother. Imagine that! Sharing a game you own? Madness.
I’m eager to pick up Ghost of Yotei from the store this afternoon, as well.
For PC games that’s impossible, at most you can find a disc-shaped steam redeem code
Family Share works really well in my experience. It worked better when I could change the users more frequently but this model is still works pretty well.
Is there a way to share a single game and use your library still?
I share my library with my son and when he’s using a game my whole library is unavailable to me, unless something has changed (or I’m old and ignorant … also likely)
And the huge drawback that if the kid finds some “easy trick to win matches” on YouTube and gets vac banned, the parent also gets vac banned
That would be grounds for a 64th trimester abortion IMO
That part changed. You only share what game is in use now.
Yeah they (if we’re talking about Steam here) changed their whole family stuff. You can keep playing, as long it’s not the same title.
That’s why I don’t really use Steam to buy games anymore, too.
At least maybe use GoG if possible to get a DRM free version.
I’ve never gone away from buying physical media, but I could understand exactly why you would want to return to it.
For me, when the Switch 1 came out it was just nice to have everything on the device and you never had to do the most heinous thing of taking a moment to put a cart into the device.
But more and more I buy one to two games a time and focus on those, so that issue is largely not a thing any more.
For me, with the Switch 1, I was worried about wanting to play a game but oh no it’s back at home. Happened a bunch of times with my 3DS.
But then I bought a case that had card slots in it, and that concern wasn’t much of a concern anymore. Then the pandemic happened, and I never really left home anyway, which meant it mattered even less. So now I have a few digital games that are super annoying to share.
You never needed physical media in order to share games with others.
You still don’t, and you can share with more people digitally.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The price increase is absurd. I cancelled too, because while I do play quite a bit, this level of corporate greed is completely unjustifiable to me. If rather watch playthroughs of new games on Twitch or YouTube and then buy them a year later on sale than pay this bloody much, eff that.
To be fair it‘s as absurd as it was inevitable. Gamepass was always meant as this temporary thing you can try out to play some new games until everyone jumps ship because of increased prices. It has been preached for years. No one could‘ve seriously thought this was a long term alternative to buying games or at least buying licenses to games on Steam. All online subscriptions are scams in the process.
Just so you know, they only thought you were stupid enough to pay more because you were stupid to enough to pay at all.
Use your brain before your wallet. Start torrenting.
Stop being average.
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.
Then they cut staff anyways, because why leave free money on the table?
It’s nice they pulled this nonsense during a steam sale. Cancelled and picked up halo mcc and silksong.
silksong isn’t on sale.
I already canceled because of the atrocities Microsoft does / is / supports.
Never would I ever subscribe to a game service. That’s just me.
I justified it as a games rental. I mean I easily paid $5 to rent a game for the weekend in the 90s. Paying 12 bucks to rent games all month long wasn’t bad (for PC).
But the price they’re charging now, I may as well buy the games I do play, rather than paying for the subscription. The problem for Microsoft is that money is gonna be going to steam instead of them.
Your justification is exemplary of how useful idiots operate.
… and here is yet another opportunity I have to post the same comment as I have been doing for the past 6+ months:
People still use Microsoft products?!
Your comment really just shout “i’m living under a rock!”
I think he’s just not an idiot like most of the people who are finally cancelling their subscriptions.
I know, it’s rare to find someone who isn’t eager to be ripped off.
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.
I work in the IT software licensing industry, it’s a fucking cancer I can’t wait to fail so bad that when we have the first extended internet outage failure so bad that it shows the world that subscriptions are a liability that shouldn’t exist
EA also further buried the ability to cancel EA accounts, after the announcement they had been sold to the Saudis and Kushner.
Between that, this, and Disney+ cancellation page “accidentally” going down during that fiasco, this is exactly why I’ve switched to using only virtual cards for subscriptions. Pause/Cancel the virtual card, voila, no more subscription.
