Six months after Microsoft pushed the Xbox Game Pass price to a record high, the company has reversed itself. On April 21, 2026, Microsoft cut the Xbox Game Pass price for its flagship Ultimate tier from $29.99 back down to $22.99 a month, while PC Game Pass fell from $16.49 to $13.99. It was the first major public decision of new Microsoft Gaming chief Asha Sharma – and a rare retreat for a subscription business that Microsoft has spent the better part of a decade promoting as the future of how people buy games.
The price cut followed a memo by new Microsoft Gaming CEO Asha Sharma, who stated Game Pass Ultimate had become “too expensive for many users” and that the October 2025 hike had caused “millions of subscribers” to leave. The price story reflects a leadership shift where Phil Spencer retired in February 2026, AI executive Asha Sharma took over, and Microsoft traded day-one Call of Duty access for a lower price, with new titles arriving roughly one year later. This analysis breaks down what changed, why it happened, what it cost, and where Game Pass goes from here.
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Xbox Game Pass Price Cut: What Changed in April 2026
The headline change is simple. According to Microsoft’s official Xbox Wire announcement on April 21, 2026, “Game Pass Ultimate drops from $29.99 to $22.99 a month,” and “PC Game Pass will also drop from $16.49 to $13.99 a month.” Both cuts took effect immediately for new and existing subscribers in the United States, with proportional adjustments rolling out across other markets. Five months later, a September 2026 price-tracker update from XboxGamePassList confirms Ultimate is still $22.99 a month in the U.S. – Microsoft has not revised the rate since, and U.S. listings dated October 16, 2026 report the same $22.99/month for Ultimate and $13.99/month for PC Game Pass.
The reduction does not return Game Pass to its pre-2025 pricing. At $22.99, Ultimate still sits 15% above the $19.99 it cost in early 2025, before the October hike. But the $7-a-month rollback – a 23% cut, as CNBC reported – works out to roughly $84 a year for an Ultimate subscriber, pulling the annual cost down from $359.88 at the old $29.99 rate to roughly $275.88. It is the single largest downward price adjustment in the program’s history, and it stands out sharply against an industry that has spent 2024 and 2025 raising prices on consoles, accessories, and first-party games alike.
What makes the move notable is its timing. Microsoft did not wait for a fiscal quarter to close or for a new console cycle. The cut landed roughly two months after Asha Sharma took over as Executive Vice President and CEO of Microsoft Gaming, signaling that the new leadership viewed the pricing structure it inherited as an active problem rather than a settled strategy. For a company that closed the $68.7 billion Activision Blizzard acquisition in 2023 partly to feed Game Pass, conceding that the service had become too expensive was a meaningful course correction.
The $19.99-to-$29.99 Hike That Started It
To understand the April 2026 cut, you have to start with October 2025. On October 1, 2025, Microsoft raised Game Pass Ultimate from $19.99 to $29.99 per month – a 50% increase delivered in a single step, confirmed by CNBC and by Reuters via U.S. News – pushing the cost of an annual Ultimate subscription to $359.88, or roughly $120 more per year, as Wired calculated at the time; Microsoft’s own April 2026 reversal announcement would later reconfirm both figures – the 50% single-step jump and the $120 added to the annual bill – as the exact baseline its new leadership was responding to. The repricing wasn’t limited to Ultimate or to the US: PC Game Pass climbed from $11.99 to $16.49 a month that same day, IGN and Windows Central both reported – itself the second increase in little over a year, after PC Game Pass had already moved from $9.99 to $11.99 in July 2024, per a 2026 pricing recap from WhatLedTo – and in the UK, Ultimate jumped from £14.99 to £22.99 a month, according to GSM Arena and Pure Xbox. It was the steepest one-time price increase in the service’s history and arrived in the same window as console price increases on Xbox Series S and Series X hardware. For many households, the timing meant the cost of the Xbox ecosystem rose on multiple fronts at once.
The logic behind the hike was straightforward on paper. Game Pass had absorbed an enormous content obligation after the Activision Blizzard deal, including the Call of Duty, Diablo, and Overwatch franchises. Day-one releases of major first-party titles cost Microsoft real money in foregone unit sales, and the company has long argued that subscribers who play those games at launch represent the highest-value customers. Raising Ultimate to $29.99 was an attempt to capture more of that value and improve the unit economics of a business that critics have repeatedly questioned for profitability.
Instead, the market pushed back hard. Subscribers downgraded to cheaper tiers or canceled outright, and the $29.99 figure became a lightning rod in gaming media and on social platforms throughout late 2025 and early 2026. By the time Microsoft cut the price in April 2026, the $29.99 Ultimate tier had lasted barely six months – an unusually short life for a flagship price point and a clear sign that the company had misjudged how much its audience would tolerate.
Xbox Game Pass Tiers and Prices in 2026
Game Pass is structured as a tiered subscription, with the most expensive Ultimate plan bundling cloud gaming, online console multiplayer, and day-one access to major releases. As of August 2026 the lineup still spans the four tiers Microsoft locked in as part of the April 2026 overhaul: Essential ($9.99/mo, 50+ games) – the tier Microsoft renamed from “Core” when it folded the restructuring into the same April 21, 2026 announcement that cut Ultimate’s price, according to FrontDeskReview – and Premium ($14.99/mo, 200+ games), which Microsoft held at $14.99 through that reshuffle just as Essential held at $9.99, both figures CNBC, IGN, and Pure Xbox confirmed untouched by the April 2026 changes, plus PC Game Pass ($13.99/mo, 300+ PC games) and Ultimate, which PCMag’s August 2026 coverage put at $22.99/mo with every feature, and whose catalog Xbox storefront data listed at 400+ games in October 2026. A July 2026 price-history tracker compiled by SubscriptionPriceGuide independently confirms the same four figures remain current. Game Pass Ultimate provides access to hundreds of games on Xbox and PC, including current Call of Duty titles, online multiplayer, cloud gaming (a monthly allowance listed at 15 hours in October 2026, per Microsoft storefront data), EA Play with a 10% discount on eligible EA digital purchases, Ubisoft Classics, and Fortnite Crew. The table below summarizes the confirmed Xbox Game Pass price points before and after the April 2026 change, alongside Sony’s competing PlayStation Plus tiers for reference.
| Plan | Price before Apr 2026 | Price after Apr 2026 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Game Pass Ultimate (monthly) | $29.99 | $22.99 | -$7.00 (-23%) |
| PC Game Pass (monthly) | $16.49 | $13.99 | -$2.50 (-15%) |
| Game Pass Premium (monthly) | $14.99 | $14.99 | No change |
| Game Pass Essential (monthly) | $9.99 | $9.99 | No change |
| PlayStation Plus Essential | $9.99 | $9.99 | No change |
| PlayStation Plus Extra | $14.99 | $14.99 | No change |
| PlayStation Plus Premium | $17.99 | $17.99 | No change |
The comparison is revealing. After the cut – a 23% reduction for Ultimate and a 15% reduction for PC Game Pass, per CNBC’s read of the announcement – Game Pass Ultimate at $22.99 still sits above every PlayStation Plus tier, including Sony’s top-end Premium plan at $17.99. But the gap is far narrower than it was at $29.99, when Ultimate cost roughly 67% more than PS Plus Premium; at $22.99 the premium over Premium is about 28%. PC Game Pass at $13.99, meanwhile, undercuts PS Plus Extra and Premium while offering a different value proposition built around day-one PC releases. The pattern holds outside the US, too: Tech-Insider’s Ireland pricing page lists Ultimate at €20.99 a month and Essential at €8.99 as of September 2026, roughly mirroring the US gap between tiers once currency is accounted for.
‘Millions of Subscribers’ Lost: The Numbers
The most striking admission in this episode is the scale of the damage. In reporting around the price cut – and again in a June 2026 report revisiting the fallout – Xbox strategy chief Matthew Ball said plainly that Game Pass had lost “millions” of subscribers after the October 2025 price hike, putting a named executive’s voice behind what had previously been treated as background chatter. That is a remarkable statement for a company that has historically been guarded about Game Pass figures, releasing subscriber milestones only sporadically.
Microsoft has publicly cited a figure of 34 million Game Pass subscribers as of early 2024, and various trackers have pointed to higher numbers in the years since. The company has not published a precise, audited subscriber count tied to the 2025-2026 swing, and the exact peak-to-trough loss has not been disclosed in a single official figure. What is clear from Microsoft’s own framing is the direction: the hike accelerated cancellations and downgrades, and the trend was severe enough to prompt a public reversal within two quarters.
According to an internal memo reported by The Verge, Asha Sharma told staff that “growth slowed down, and subscriber loss accelerated” after the pricing and SKU changes of the prior year. She added that “since our price reduction, we have seen acquisitions grow, and retention improve.” In a follow-up update to employees in May 2026 – “We Are Building A Stronger Xbox” – Sharma reinforced that the rebound is early and partial, telling staff the company “will not solve this in one moment or one launch” and would have to “outwork the problem in front of us in our path to restore durable growth.” Taken together, those comments are effectively Microsoft’s own diagnosis: the $29.99 experiment suppressed both new sign-ups and renewals, lowering the price began to reverse both at once, and the recovery is still a work in progress as of mid-2026.
Asha Sharma’s Arrival and the Leadership Reset
The pricing reversal cannot be separated from one of the biggest leadership changes in Xbox history. On February 20, 2026, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced that Asha Sharma had been named Executive Vice President and CEO of Microsoft Gaming, reporting directly to Nadella. Xbox’s own editor’s note says that as of April 23, 2026, Microsoft Gaming is known as XBOX and Asha Sharma’s title is CEO XBOX. Asha Sharma, who took over from Phil Spencer in February 2026, previously led Microsoft’s CoreAI product organization and held senior roles at Instacart and Meta. Her appointment placed a product and AI executive – rather than a lifelong gaming insider – at the top of the division.
The transition was sweeping. Phil Spencer retired from Microsoft in February 2026, after nearly four decades at the company, and was succeeded by Asha Sharma as CEO of Microsoft Gaming. Sarah Bond, who had served as President of Xbox since 2023, also departed the company “to begin a new chapter,” as Microsoft’s announcement put it. As part of the reshuffle, longtime studios leader Matt Booty was elevated to Executive Vice President and Chief Content Officer, reporting to Sharma. In the span of a single announcement, the three executives most associated with the modern Xbox era were either gone or reassigned.
Why an AI Executive Now Runs Xbox
Sharma’s CoreAI background is not incidental. Microsoft has been weaving generative AI into its consumer and developer products across the company, and gaming is increasingly viewed through that lens – from content tooling to personalization to cloud delivery. Placing an AI-native leader over Xbox signals that Microsoft sees the next phase of gaming competition as much about platform intelligence and services as about exclusive titles. The immediate price cut, however, showed that Sharma’s first priority was a more fundamental issue: stopping subscriber attrition before reimagining the platform. Her May 2026 employee note pointed to making Game Pass “more accessible” over the course of the year, suggesting value and reach – not price hikes – will frame the next round of changes.
The Catch: Call of Duty Loses Day-One Status
The April 2026 price cut was not a pure giveaway. Microsoft’s own announcement confirmed a significant tradeoff: future Call of Duty titles will no longer join Game Pass Ultimate or PC Game Pass at launch. Instead, new Call of Duty games will be added to the library later – Microsoft pointed to the following holiday season, roughly a year after release. Existing Call of Duty titles already in the catalog remain available, and that policy is still in force in mid-July 2026.
This is a meaningful concession dressed up as a benefit reshuffle. Call of Duty is one of the best-selling franchises in the industry, and day-one Game Pass access to a new entry has been among the most powerful subscriber-acquisition hooks Microsoft acquired in the Activision deal. By delaying that access, Microsoft preserves full-price sales of new Call of Duty games to non-subscribers while still lowering the headline Game Pass price. Subscribers who want the newest entry at launch now face a clear choice: buy it outright at the standard $69.99 list price, or wait roughly a year for it to reach the library the following holiday season. In effect, the company shifted the cost of the price cut onto the franchise’s launch-window exclusivity rather than absorbing it entirely on margin.
It also marks a quiet retreat from a principle Microsoft executives once stated flatly. In an earlier Xbox podcast, Spencer, Bond, and Booty reiterated that “all of our games will go into Game Pass on day one.” Carving out Call of Duty from that promise – even temporarily – is one of the clearest indications yet that Microsoft is willing to trade ideological purity on the day-one model for healthier economics.
Why Microsoft Reversed Course: The Economics
The financial backdrop helps explain why Microsoft acted quickly. Gaming is a material business for the company. According to Microsoft’s FY2025 annual report, released in July 2025 and covering the fiscal year ended June 30, 2025, total gaming revenue reached roughly $23.5 billion, with Xbox content and services revenue of about $20.3 billion. Crucially, that July 2025 disclosure marked the first time Game Pass annual revenue had reportedly crossed the nearly $5 billion mark – about 21% of Xbox’s total-year revenue – underscoring just how central the subscription had become even before the pricing turmoil that followed a few months later. Content and services – the bucket that includes Game Pass – is now the heart of the Xbox business, far outweighing hardware. That makes subscriber count, retention, and lifetime value the metrics that matter most.
When a subscription business sheds “millions” of members, the damage compounds. Each lost subscriber represents not just a forgone monthly fee but reduced engagement, lower in-game spending, and weaker network effects across multiplayer titles. A 50% price increase might lift average revenue per remaining user, but if it drives enough cancellations, total recurring revenue can fall even as the per-user figure rises. With Game Pass already a near-$5-billion line item, even a single-digit percentage of churn translates into hundreds of millions in at-risk revenue. Microsoft’s decision to cut the price suggests its internal modeling concluded that volume and retention were worth more than a higher sticker price – especially with the Call of Duty delay clawing back some of the lost margin.
There is also a strategic dimension. Game Pass is Microsoft’s primary lever for keeping players inside the Xbox ecosystem as the company increasingly distributes its games across PlayStation, Nintendo, and PC. If the subscription becomes too expensive, the ecosystem’s gravitational pull weakens precisely as Microsoft asks players to stay loyal without exclusive hardware advantages. Pricing Game Pass for scale, not for maximum extraction, aligns with a multiplatform future where the subscription itself is the moat.
Game Pass vs PlayStation Plus: Subscription Showdown
Microsoft’s subscription strategy looks very different from Sony’s, and the contrast sharpens the stakes of the price cut. Sony has leaned on hardware scale and a steadier, tiered subscription, while Microsoft has bet on Game Pass as the centerpiece of its model. The table below lays out the key competitive metrics from each company’s most recent public disclosures, including Sony’s FY2025 results announced May 8, 2026.
| Metric | Microsoft / Xbox | Sony / PlayStation |
|---|---|---|
| Flagship subscription | Game Pass Ultimate – $22.99/mo | PlayStation Plus Premium – $17.99/mo |
| Entry subscription | Game Pass Essential – $9.99/mo | PS Plus Essential – $9.99/mo |
| Reported subscribers | “Millions” lost after Oct 2025 hike (34M last confirmed, early 2024) | 47.0 million PS Plus (end of FY2025) |
| Game Pass annual revenue | Nearly $5 billion (FY2025, first time) | – |
| Current-gen consoles sold | Xbox Series X|S – over 35 million | PS5 – 93.6 million (Mar 31, 2026) |
| Platform monthly active users | Xbox network ~120 million (est.) | 125 million (Mar 31, 2026) |
| Library size (top tier) | 400+ games | Hundreds across Extra/Premium |
The numbers tell a clear story about the competitive landscape. Sony’s PS5 has sold 93.6 million units as of March 31, 2026, roughly two and a half times Xbox Series X|S lifetime hardware sales – though Sony’s own FY2025 report flagged that recent quarterly PS5 sell-through has slowed sharply as the console matures. PlayStation Plus reported 47.0 million subscribers, a figure Microsoft has not matched with a comparable confirmed Game Pass number. Sony’s advantage is install-base scale; Microsoft’s bet is that a compelling, fairly priced subscription can generate recurring revenue across many devices rather than depending on console dominance. The April price cut is an admission that the subscription only works if it is priced to grow.
Is Xbox Game Pass Worth It at $22.99? What to Do Right Now
The practical question for most readers isn’t why Microsoft reversed course, it’s whether to resubscribe, upgrade, or downgrade at the current prices. The right call depends on which tier fits your habits and whether day-one Call of Duty access matters to you.
- If you canceled after the $29.99 hike: U.S. listings now show Game Pass Ultimate at $22.99 a month, well below that earlier 2025 price, and the sources reviewed show no sign of another increase. For subscribers who left purely over cost, this is a good moment to take another look.
- If you play Call of Duty on launch day: Factor in the roughly year-long wait before new entries join the library. Buying the game standalone at $69.99 and pairing it with the cheaper Game Pass Premium ($14.99) or Essential ($9.99) tier may cost less overall than paying for Ultimate just for day-one access you no longer get.
- If you play mostly on PC: PC Game Pass at $13.99 undercuts Ultimate by $9 a month and still covers 300+ PC titles, making it the better value unless you specifically need console cloud gaming or console multiplayer.
- If you’re weighing Game Pass against PlayStation Plus: Ultimate at $22.99 still costs $5 more per month than PS Plus Premium at $17.99, so the decision comes down to which library and ecosystem you actually use, not price alone.
None of this is guaranteed to hold indefinitely. Microsoft has not committed publicly to keeping Ultimate at $22.99 forever, and the predictions later in this article outline why another change – to pricing, tiers, or the Call of Duty policy – remains plausible over the next year.
Market Impact and Industry Reaction
The reversal reverberated across the gaming industry because it tested a hypothesis the whole sector has been watching: how much can publishers raise subscription prices before customers walk? Microsoft’s answer – that a jump to $29.99 was too far, fast enough to require a public retreat – sets a practical ceiling that competitors and investors will note. For a market that watched streaming services like Netflix and Disney+ repeatedly raise prices with limited churn, gaming’s price sensitivity looks comparatively sharp.
For consumers, the immediate impact is straightforward: Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass cost less than they did in late 2025, though still more than in early 2025. The Call of Duty caveat means the most dedicated Call of Duty fans may still prefer to buy new entries outright rather than wait a year for them to reach the library. For Microsoft’s partners and developers, the episode underscores that day-one Game Pass placement is not guaranteed even for the company’s biggest franchises, which could influence how studios value the platform.
The leadership change adds another layer. Investors and analysts now read Game Pass decisions through Asha Sharma’s lens rather than Phil Spencer’s, and the speed of her first move suggests a willingness to break with prior commitments when the data demands it. That is a different posture from the Spencer era, which prioritized long-term platform vision and the day-one promise even when profitability was questioned. Her May 2026 framing – that the turnaround will take sustained effort rather than a single fix – signals the data-first posture is here to stay.
Historical Context: Subscription Pricing in Gaming
Game subscription services are still young relative to the broader media industry, and pricing discipline has been inconsistent. Game Pass launched in 2017 at a low introductory price designed to seed adoption, and Microsoft held the line on aggressive pricing for years while it built the library and signed the Activision Blizzard deal. Zoomed out further, the climb has been steady rather than sudden: SubscriptionPriceGuide’s July 2026 price-history calculation puts today’s $22.99 Ultimate rate 53% above the $14.99 it cost back in 2021, even after accounting for April’s rollback. The 2025 hike represented a shift from growth-at-any-cost to monetization – a pivot many subscription businesses make as they mature, and one that often overshoots.
The pattern echoes what happened across video streaming. Services that spent years acquiring subscribers cheaply eventually raised prices, introduced ad tiers, and cracked down on sharing – sometimes triggering visible churn before stabilizing. Microsoft’s October-to-April round trip compressed that entire cycle into six months, in part because gaming subscribers have alternatives: they can buy individual games, switch to PlayStation Plus, or simply play what they already own. Unlike a streaming catalog, a game library’s value is highly personal, which makes price increases harder to justify uniformly.
The Activision Blizzard acquisition, closed in 2023 for $68.7 billion, looms over all of this. Microsoft justified the deal in part by the content it would funnel into Game Pass. A pricing strategy that drives subscribers away undercuts that thesis, which is one reason the company could not let the $29.99 experiment run indefinitely. The price cut is, in a sense, a defense of the entire Activision rationale – and with Game Pass now generating nearly $5 billion a year, protecting that revenue base is no longer a niche concern but a core financial priority.
What Executives Are Saying
The most authoritative voices in this story are Microsoft’s own. In the company’s official Xbox Wire post, Microsoft stated plainly: “Starting today, Game Pass Ultimate drops from $29.99 to $22.99 a month. PC Game Pass will also drop from $16.49 to $13.99 a month.” That single sentence reframed the narrative from one of relentless price increases to one of correction.
According to the internal memo reported by The Verge, Asha Sharma was direct about the diagnosis: “Growth slowed down, and subscriber loss accelerated after the pricing and SKU changes last year.” She paired that with an early read on the fix: “Since our price reduction, we have seen acquisitions grow, and retention improve.” In her May 2026 “We Are Building A Stronger Xbox” update, she tempered the optimism, telling employees the company “will not solve this in one moment or one launch” and would “outwork the problem in front of us in our path to restore durable growth.” Coming from the executive who ordered the cut, the comments function as both an admission of error and a justification for reversing it – while setting expectations that the recovery is a multi-quarter effort.
The framing from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella around Sharma’s February appointment positioned her to lead the next era of Microsoft’s gaming business, reporting directly to him – a structural signal that gaming remains a top-tier priority even as the leadership changed hands. And the legacy view still echoes through the company’s earlier statements: Spencer, Bond, and Booty’s promise that “all of our games will go into Game Pass on day one” is the very commitment the Call of Duty change now partially walks back, illustrating how quickly platform strategy can shift under new management.
5 Predictions for Game Pass and Xbox in 2026-2027
Based on the current trajectory, here are five evidence-based predictions for how the Game Pass story develops over the next 12 to 18 months.
- Microsoft will publish a subscriber milestone again. Having admitted to “millions” of losses, Microsoft has an incentive to announce a recovery figure once the price cut and retention gains produce a positive number. With Sharma already telling staff acquisitions and retention are improving, expect a renewed subscriber milestone disclosure within a few quarters.
- The $22.99 price will hold through at least 2026. After a costly reversal, Microsoft is unlikely to raise Ultimate again soon – and indeed it had not as of mid-July 2026. The next pricing experiment is more likely to involve add-ons, bundles, or AI-powered features than a flat increase.
- More franchises could follow the Call of Duty day-one carve-out. If delaying Call of Duty’s day-one access protects sales without crushing subscriptions, Microsoft may apply selective launch windows to other tentpole titles, eroding the universal day-one promise further.
- AI features will become a Game Pass differentiator. With an AI-native executive in charge and a stated goal of making Game Pass “more accessible” in 2026, expect Microsoft to position personalization, discovery, and cloud-delivery improvements as reasons to subscribe, distinguishing Game Pass from PlayStation Plus on capability rather than catalog alone.
- The multiplatform push will intensify. As Microsoft distributes more games to rival platforms, Game Pass – not hardware – becomes the retention engine. Expect deeper integration of Game Pass into PC and cloud endpoints and continued de-emphasis of console exclusivity.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Xbox Game Pass price in 2026?
As of September 2026, Xbox Game Pass Ultimate costs $22.99 per month and PC Game Pass costs $13.99 per month in the United States, the rates set by Microsoft’s official Xbox Wire announcement on April 21, 2026, independently confirmed by TechZeeno’s August 2026 pricing roundup, and again verified by XboxGamePassList’s September 2026 tracker. The lower tiers are Game Pass Premium at $14.99 and Game Pass Essential at $9.99. These prices replaced the higher $29.99 and $16.49 Ultimate and PC figures set during the October 2025 increase, and Microsoft has not changed them since.
Why did Microsoft cut the Game Pass price?
Microsoft cut the price after acknowledging that the October 2025 hike to $29.99 caused the loss of “millions of subscribers.” New Microsoft Gaming CEO Asha Sharma said growth slowed and subscriber loss accelerated after the increase, and that acquisitions and retention improved after the price was reduced. In a May 2026 follow-up, she cautioned the recovery would take sustained effort rather than a single fix.
How much did Game Pass cost before the price cut?
Before April 2026, Game Pass Ultimate cost $29.99 per month following the October 2025 increase from $19.99 – a 50% jump reported by both Reuters and CNBC. PC Game Pass cost $16.49 per month, itself up from $11.99 before the October 2025 repricing, per Windows Central. The April 2026 cut brought Ultimate to $22.99 and PC Game Pass to $13.99, both of which remain the current prices as of August 2026.
Is Call of Duty still on Game Pass at launch?
No. As part of the April 2026 changes, future Call of Duty titles will no longer join Game Pass Ultimate or PC Game Pass on launch day. Microsoft said new entries will be added to the library later, around the following holiday season – roughly a year after release. To play a new entry at launch, subscribers must buy it separately at the standard $69.99 price. Existing Call of Duty games already in the catalog remain available, and that policy is still in effect as of mid-July 2026.
Who is the new head of Xbox in 2026?
Asha Sharma became Executive Vice President and CEO of Microsoft Gaming on February 20, 2026, reporting to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Microsoft Gaming has since been renamed XBOX, and her title is now CEO XBOX. She previously led Microsoft’s CoreAI product organization and held senior roles at Instacart and Meta. Phil Spencer retired and former Xbox President Sarah Bond left the company.
How does Game Pass compare to PlayStation Plus on price?
After the cut, Game Pass Ultimate at $22.99 is still more expensive than PlayStation Plus Premium at $17.99. Sony’s PS Plus tiers are Essential ($9.99), Extra ($14.99), and Premium ($17.99). In its FY2025 results announced May 8, 2026, Sony reported 47.0 million PS Plus subscribers and 93.6 million PS5 units sold as of March 31, 2026.
Will the Game Pass price go up again?
Microsoft has not announced any further increases, and as of mid-July 2026 the $22.99 Ultimate price still stands. Given the costly reversal of the 2025 hike, that price is likely to hold for the near term, with future monetization more likely to come from add-ons, bundles, or new features rather than another flat price increase.
Is Xbox Game Pass Ultimate worth it at $22.99?
For most subscribers who left only because of the $29.99 price, yes – the $22.99 rate restores most of the value that drove the original backlash. The exception is Call of Duty fans who want day-one access, since that benefit no longer comes with any Game Pass tier; they may be better served buying new entries standalone at $69.99 and choosing a cheaper tier like Premium ($14.99) or PC Game Pass ($13.99) for everything else.
Sources: Xbox Wire, Microsoft Corporate Blog, The Verge, Sony Interactive Entertainment, and PlayStation. Figures reflect company disclosures as of mid-July 2026.
