Game Pass 2025

Last week was not good for Xbox. If you don’t keep up with video game news, I’ll catch you up:

Xbox tried to raise video game prices to $80, starting with Outer World 2, as I mentioned earlier this year. No one on earth thought that was a game worth $80, and so Xbox backpeddled.

Xbox raise prices on console in May 1, 2025 and October 3, 2025. Currently the Xbox Series X is $650 (originally sold for $500).

Xbox announced a 50% price hike to their popular Game Pass, while taking away discount perks. The most expensive tier is now $30.

The Game Pass to $30 was the final straw. The internet backlashed was immediate. Reports of mass cancellation caused the Xbox’s website to crash. It was trending on Google search, and everybody was talking about it. People thought if they had raised the price slowly, like $4 here, and $4 in another six months… people wouldn’t notice. But to hit everyone with the price increase at once… well it caused a lot of fans to reevaluate their subscription. When you do the math, it’s $360 a year.

The confusing thing is that Xbox’s President have publicly stated that Game Pass was/is profitable (when it was $20). I’ve never thought that was true, and with the recent price increase, I think that Xbox is lying. There is a chance that they really are making profit, in which case, this price hike is just pure greed on their part. They need to raise money to pay for their Activision Blizzard ($69 billion) purchase.

So, what’s the state of the Weekend Gamer? I hate to say it, but I cancelled my Xbox Game Pass more than a month ago, before the price increase. The reason had more to do with my attention to migrating to WordPress from TypePad, and just tweaking and setting things up for “Rocktober”. I knew I wasn’t going to have any time for video games; it was an easy decision for me to make.

You may have noticed that I haven’t reviewed any Game Pass games in a while. The last Game Pass game was for Oblivion Remastered in April 2025.

The other heart-breaking item is that once I found out the ROG Xbox Ally X would be $1,000, I had to step off my plan on getting one. It’s a shame, because I was investing in the “Play Anywhere” games. The thought was to run it on the ROG Xbox, but also have those games available on my Xbox X. Since I’m abandoning the ROG Xbox, I think I need to go back to gaming on GOG or Steam. Their prices are generally cheaper.