Microsoft finally said the quiet part out loud. Xbox Game Pass lost millions of subscribers in the months following its October 2025 price hike, and the company is now openly talking about how badly that decision hurt the service. This isn’t a leak or an estimate from some analyst — it came straight from Xbox’s own chief strategy officer, Matthew Ball, during a live interview at Summer Game Fest 2026.
If you’ve been following the chaos at Xbox over the past year or so, none of this is shocking. But hearing it confirmed officially is a pretty big deal, and it explains a lot of the moves the new leadership team has been making since taking over.
What Actually Happened With the Price Hike
Back in October 2025, Microsoft pushed the price of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate from $19.99 to $29.99 per month — a full 50% increase. The company tried to justify it by bundling in extras like Fortnite Crew and Ubisoft+ Classics, but players weren’t buying it, literally and figuratively.
The backlash was immediate. People cancelled. Not just a few thousand, but millions over the span of a few months. Ball was pretty direct about it at Summer Game Fest, saying the service “shed millions of subscribers” in the wake of that hike. At the time of the increase, Game Pass was estimated to be sitting somewhere around 34 to 35 million subscribers. Losing even a few million out of that base is a massive hit to both revenue and momentum.
The worst part? It happened right as Xbox was already dealing with criticism about the lack of strong exclusive titles and the decision to bring former Xbox exclusives over to PlayStation and other platforms. The price hike just piled onto an already frustrated community.
Asha Sharma Steps In and Rolls It Back
When Phil Spencer stepped down from his role as Xbox CEO earlier this year, Asha Sharma came in and wasted no time diagnosing what was wrong. In an internal memo that quickly went public, she was blunt: Game Pass had become too expensive for players, and the company needed a better value equation.
On April 21, 2026, she followed through. Xbox Game Pass Ultimate was dropped from $29.99 down to $22.99 per month, and PC Game Pass went from $16.49 to $13.99. It wasn’t a full rollback to where prices were before 2025, but it was a meaningful correction that acknowledged the previous hike overshot what players were willing to pay.
The trade-off, though, is real. Going forward, new Call of Duty titles will no longer land on Game Pass day one. Instead, they’ll be added around the following holiday season after launch — roughly a year delay. It’s a noticeable change, especially since day-one Call of Duty was one of the bigger selling points of the Ultimate tier after Microsoft’s Activision Blizzard acquisition. Check out the full breakdown of what changed in our Xbox Games Showcase 2026 coverage for more context on where the service is heading.
Are Things Actually Getting Better?
Ball said during his Summer Game Fest interview that some of the recent changes are “resonating” with users, which is a carefully worded way of saying things have improved without giving away hard numbers. Microsoft stopped publicly disclosing subscriber counts a while back, so there’s no official data to confirm whether lapsed users have come back after the price drop.
What we do know is that Sharma herself confirmed in a memo last month that subscriber loss had “accelerated” after the 2025 pricing changes, and that the price drop was described as a “good first step” rather than the complete solution. That phrasing matters — it tells you the company knows it has more work to do beyond just adjusting the monthly cost.
Ball also acknowledged that Game Pass Ultimate at $22.99 is still more expensive than it was before the October 2025 hike, but argued the value proposition has changed. Whether players agree with that is another story.
The Game Library Situation Is Improving
Price aside, one of the biggest ways Xbox is trying to win people back is by actually delivering games worth subscribing for. For years the biggest knock on Xbox Series X and S was a drought of system-selling exclusives. That narrative is finally starting to shift.
The Xbox Games Showcase 2026 dropped some genuinely exciting news. Game Pass is getting 17 new titles, including Halo: Campaign Evolved, Spyro: A Realm Beyond, and Fable. These are big names, the kind of games that make the subscription feel worth it again. You can see the full list in our Xbox Games Showcase 2026 roundup.
On top of that, Xbox is shifting its exclusivity stance. Gears of War: E-Day was confirmed as a full console exclusive on Xbox, ditching the multiplatform approach that upset a lot of fans. Clockwork Revolution in 2027 is also being kept exclusive. Ball has also promised a “reliable pipeline” of console exclusives moving forward, which is exactly what the Xbox community has been asking for.
If you want to see some of the individual game announcements that came out of the showcase, we covered the Persona 6 Xbox announcement and the surprise Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 3 reveal separately.
What About the Multi-Platform Strategy
One of the things Ball touched on at Summer Game Fest is the broader question of Xbox’s platform strategy. Putting games like Halo and Avowed on PS5 helped recoup development costs in the short term, but it also removed a reason for players to actually own an Xbox or subscribe to Game Pass. New leadership appears to understand that trade-off now in a way that the previous regime didn’t fully account for.
Previously announced multiplatform releases are still going ahead as planned — that ship has sailed. But future titles under the new strategy are being kept exclusive where it makes sense. It’s a smarter balance, and for once Xbox seems to be playing the long game rather than chasing short-term revenue.
If you’re curious what Xbox hardware looks like heading into that future, the recently unveiled Xbox Series X|25 Limited Edition console gives a solid idea of where the brand’s aesthetic and identity is going.
Project Helix Is the Real Long Game
Beyond fixing the current subscription mess, Microsoft has its eyes on the future. Project Helix is the next-gen Xbox console currently in development, and it’s a significant departure from the traditional console formula. It’s being designed as a hybrid that plays both Xbox console games and PC titles natively, powered by a custom AMD SoC with RDNA 5 architecture built on TSMC’s 3nm process.
Developer alpha hardware is expected to start going out to studios in 2027, with a public consumer launch likely landing in late 2027 or sometime in 2028. It’s still a ways off, but the foundation is being laid now. Winning back Game Pass subscribers, building an exclusive game library, and restoring trust with the Xbox community — all of that needs to happen before Project Helix launches if the console is going to have any real shot at strong day-one adoption.
The window to turn things around in the current generation is basically closed. But how Xbox handles the next 18 months will determine how many players are actually excited for what comes next. There are some genuinely promising signs right now, more than there have been in a long time.
The Bottom Line
Xbox Game Pass losing millions of subscribers after a 50% price increase isn’t surprising in hindsight, but hearing it confirmed officially puts the scale of the damage in perspective. The price rollback, the renewed focus on exclusives, and the incoming game lineup
