After this week’s price hike, more price hikes are likely, especially in regions where the currency is much weaker.

We’ve written about the Xbox Game Pass price hike before, and despite Microsoft’s legal team saying last June that there would be no price hike after the Activision Blizzard King acquisition, Xbox boss Phil Spencer said in September that they would have to resort to price hikes at some point. After the Call of Duty acquisition, many suspected that Microsoft would do so, and Rhys Elliott, games industry analyst at Midia Rearch, told WCCFTech:

“Xbox has largely maximized its subscriber base on the console, so it’s looking to maximize average revenue per paying user (ARPPU) and attract new subscribers with the higher price precedent. Call of Duty is about to bring in more subscribers, so the timing makes sense. Expect more price increases in the future. The PC price increase suggests that growth is starting to saturate there as well. Poaching PC gamers from Steam is nearly impossible… Game Pass Console doesn’t grant day-one online access to non-free-to-play games like CoD (Game Pass Ultimate does), so the OG tier is basically a confusing legacy tier that doesn’t fit the new direction. Xbox has been hiding GP Console on their store lately, so the writing has been on the wall for a while.

A replacement for Game Pass Console, Standard is basically Game Pass Core with a larger library of games (and no first-party Day One). This tier is Xbox’s half-step from Core to Ultimate. Removing the day-one stuff also retrains some Ultimate holdouts to buy new premium games, which in turn increases ARPPU. Cannibalized premium revenue is a massive opportunity cost for Xbox (slightly offset by paid early access). Ultimately, these changes reflect Xbox’s recent strategy of upselling fans to Ultimate and increasing ARPPU ahead of the company’s huge off-platform mobile/cloud push. PC and console will remain important, but those markets are reaching saturation, and Xbox needs growth (it’s a public company in an era of big tech efficiencies and cutbacks). Xbox’s big platform-agnostic play continues,” Elliott said.

The mobile expansion is a good one to mention: the mobile Xbox Store will pop up in browsers sometime this month…

Source: WCCFTech