Xbox Game Pass Price Cuts Are Working, CEO Asha Sharma Confirms — Plus the XBOX Rebrand Explained
It hasn’t been an easy few years for Xbox on the subscription front, but things appear to be turning around. In a new internal memo obtained by The Verge, Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has confirmed that the recent Game Pass price cuts are already producing real, measurable results — more people signing up, and fewer people walking out the door. It’s early days, and Sharma herself is the first to say there’s a long road ahead, but after the mess of October 2025, any forward momentum is worth paying attention to.
Here’s the full breakdown of how Xbox got into this situation, what Sharma’s memo actually says, and what the XBOX rebrand is really about.
The October 2025 Price Hike That Blew Up in Xbox’s Face
To understand why any of this matters, you have to go back to October 2025, when the previous Xbox leadership made one of the most universally criticized decisions in the subscription service’s history. Xbox Game Pass Ultimate jumped from $19.99 a month to $29.99 — a full 50% price increase delivered practically overnight. The community reaction wasn’t just negative. It was explosive.
Long-time subscribers started canceling in droves. The discourse online was furious. But the criticism that really stung came from somewhere closer to home. Laura Fryer, one of the original co-founders of Microsoft Game Studios and someone who helped build the Xbox brand from the ground up in the early 2000s, published a 13-minute video on her YouTube channel calling the decision a flat-out betrayal. She said Microsoft had “threw away one of their last advantages” by torching what had been the best-value subscription in gaming, and used the phrase “greed over gaming” to describe the direction the company was heading. Coming from someone who helped make Xbox what it is, that cut deep.
Fryer also pointed to what she called a “yes man culture” that had taken root in Xbox’s upper management since 2008, arguing that leadership had become insulated from actual player feedback and was increasingly making decisions in a corporate bubble rather than with gamers in mind. Whether you agreed with her or not, the fact that a founding figure of the Xbox project was publicly roasting her former employer said everything about how bad the situation had gotten.
Sharma, in her May 28 memo, directly acknowledged the damage: “Growth slowed down and subscriber loss accelerated after the pricing and SKU changes last year.” No spin, no euphemism — just a straightforward admission that the October 2025 hike hurt the service badly.
Asha Sharma’s First Big Move: Cut the Price Back Down
When Asha Sharma took over as Xbox CEO in early 2026, replacing longtime boss Phil Spencer who had retired after 38 years at Microsoft, one of her very first public moves was to acknowledge the problem in a leaked internal memo from April. In it, she stated directly that Game Pass had become too expensive for players and that the company needed a “better value equation.” She also signaled longer-term plans to evolve Game Pass into a more flexible system, though she cautioned that would take time to figure out.
A week after that memo went public, Sharma followed through with action. In late April 2026, Xbox Game Pass Ultimate was cut from $29.99 back down to $22.99 per month. It wasn’t a full return to the old $19.99 price point, but it was a meaningful rollback that acknowledged the previous hike had gone too far. There was a trade-off involved — future Call of Duty titles would no longer be available on the service at launch, a notable change for subscribers who had come to expect the franchise day one — but the headline reduction gave the service a much more defensible value proposition.
What the May 28 Memo Actually Says
In the most recent internal memo obtained by The Verge, dated May 28, 2026, Sharma provided the first real update on how the price cut has performed since going into effect. The key line: “Since our price reduction we have seen acquisitions grow and retention improve, which is a good first step.”
No specific subscriber numbers or percentages were shared in the memo — Sharma kept it high level — but the framing is significant. This is Xbox’s own CEO, in an internal document not intended for public release, stating clearly that new subscribers are coming in and existing ones are sticking around at a higher rate than before. That’s a meaningful signal even without the hard data behind it.
At the same time, Sharma is being deliberately measured about the win. She follows up the positive note by saying: “We will not solve this in one moment or one launch. We will have to outwork the problem in front of us in our path to restore durable growth.” That’s the kind of language that tells you the leadership team isn’t declaring victory — they know that one good month doesn’t undo a year of subscriber erosion, and that rebuilding trust with a community that felt burned takes consistent delivery over time.
What’s at Stake for Game Pass Going Forward
The bigger picture here is that Xbox finds itself at a genuinely pivotal moment. Microsoft’s gaming revenue fell 9% in the most recent holiday quarter, with Xbox content and services coming in below internal projections. Game Pass has always been the crown jewel of Xbox’s strategy — the thing that was supposed to justify staying in the console ecosystem even as Xbox’s exclusive game lineup thinned out. When that service starts losing subscribers, it’s not just a subscription business problem. It’s an identity problem.
Sharma’s longer-term vision for Game Pass seems to point toward a more tiered, flexible system — though the specifics haven’t been laid out yet. The Discord Nitro partnership is one early example of that thinking in action: Discord Nitro members now get access to a starter version of Game Pass at no extra charge, which is exactly the kind of creative bundling that could bring new users into the ecosystem who wouldn’t have subscribed at all otherwise. Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters has also publicly confirmed that he’s had conversations with Sharma about potential subscription bundle options, though nothing concrete has been announced from that direction yet.
The Xbox Games Showcase on June 7 is the next big moment for Xbox to make its case. A strong software lineup and more clarity around what Game Pass looks like going forward would do more for subscriber confidence than any memo, however honest it might be.
The XBOX Rebrand — What It Is and Why It Happened
The same May 28 memo also addressed what has been one of the more confusing and hotly debated moves of Sharma’s early tenure: the decision to rebrand the company from “Xbox” to “XBOX” — all caps.
Here’s how it actually went down. On May 13, 2026, Sharma posted a poll on X with a genuinely simple question: “Xbox or XBOX?” Out of just over 19,000 votes, nearly 65% chose the all-caps version. Within 48 hours, the official Xbox account on X had been renamed to XBOX, and Sharma updated her own LinkedIn to reflect the change. Microsoft, when contacted by The Verge for comment, simply pointed back to the poll.
It’s worth noting what this rebrand actually is and isn’t. This is not a full legal rename. XBOX won’t appear on official corporate documentation or filings. Right now it’s primarily a social media and marketing stylization — as of writing, Xbox’s accounts on Bluesky, Threads, Instagram, and YouTube still use the mixed-case version. Think of it more as a branding signal than a formal identity change.
In the May 28 memo, Sharma explained the thinking behind it: “We are building a stronger XBOX. That means making hard choices about what we build, where we invest, and what kind of company we need to be going forward. That is part of what you are starting to see in the shift from Xbox to XBOX. It reflects a decision to be deliberate in how we show up for the players who care most about this brand.”
In context, the move makes more sense than it might first appear. The original Xbox launched in 2001 with all-caps styling. By leaning back into that capitalization, Sharma is visually connecting the current era of Xbox to the brand’s roots — which fits neatly into the broader “return of Xbox” narrative she’s been building since taking over. It’s a callback to a time when Xbox stood for something specific and exciting, before years of business pivots and mixed messaging started to dilute what the brand actually meant to players.
Whether it works as a symbolic gesture is a matter of opinion, and plenty of fans found it either unnecessary or genuinely baffling that a Twitter poll was allowed to influence official brand direction for a multi-billion dollar platform. But paired with the logo refresh to a classic green, the reversion from “Microsoft Gaming” back to just Xbox, and the Game Pass price cuts, it’s clearly part of a deliberate package of moves designed to say: this is a new era, and we’re paying attention to what you actually want.
Is Xbox Actually Turning Things Around?
The honest answer is: it’s too early to know for certain, but the trajectory is pointing in the right direction for the first time in a while. Sharma has moved fast — maybe faster than anyone expected from a CEO who came out of Microsoft’s AI division rather than the gaming world. The price cut, the rebrand, the Discord partnership, the “We Are Xbox” memo, killing the Microsoft Gaming label — all of that has happened inside two months of her taking the job.
The risk is that moves like the XBOX poll feel more like fan service than strategy, and that the hard questions — what does the Game Pass library look like without day-one Call of Duty? How does Xbox compete with PlayStation’s first-party strength? What does “durable growth” actually mean in practice? — still don’t have satisfying answers.
But Sharma has at least done something her predecessors weren’t doing enough of in 2025: listening. The price admission alone — publicly acknowledging that Game Pass became too expensive and that subscriber loss accelerated because of choices Microsoft made — is the kind of accountability that the Xbox community had been asking for. The results, however preliminary, suggest it’s starting to pay off.
The June 7 Xbox Games Showcase will be a much bigger test. Software sells subscriptions, and right now Game Pass needs a statement month to back up all the memo-level promises.
For more XBOX coverage and gaming news, check out our breakdown of the full Xbox Game Pass June 2026 games lineup, everything you need to know about Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4’s grounded cosmetics pledge, and the latest on the Pokémon TCG 30th Celebration Set reveal.
