What has long been rumored about Microsoft’s subscription service may finally be moving closer to reality.

Asha Sharma, the new head of Xbox and CEO of Microsoft Gaming, is reportedly looking for ways to deliver on the promise of an Xbox comeback. One obvious route would be to make Xbox Game Pass, and the broader Xbox brand, more appealing to a wider audience by offering lower-priced plans. According to The Information, Sharma is likely aiming for the easiest early win possible as she steps into the role of the public face of Microsoft’s gaming business. Lowering Game Pass prices instead of raising them, as Microsoft did last year, would almost certainly earn her some goodwill from players.

How far that goodwill would go, however, depends on whether prices would actually be reduced or merely rolled back to where they stood before the last increase. A lower price is naturally more attractive, but because the most recent hike is still fresh in players’ minds, simply undoing it would not feel like much of a genuine bargain. It will also be interesting to see what those supposedly cheaper tiers would actually look like, especially when compared to the premium high-end plans, since Sharma reportedly wants to go beyond a simple price adjustment.

Xbox is also said to be considering a restructuring of Xbox Game Pass that could bundle in services such as a Netflix subscription. Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters has stated that he is not ruling out any form of cooperation with Xbox, and if the pricing is right, that could make Game Pass significantly more attractive, especially for users who treat their Xbox more as a hub for media apps than as a pure gaming machine.

It is also possible that the report is hinting Microsoft may finally be ready to introduce an ad-supported version of Game Pass, or at least of its Cloud Gaming service. A lower barrier to entry combined with ads that players would have to tolerate is clearly one path Microsoft could explore, particularly since other subscription services that are not directly comparable to Game Pass, such as Amazon Prime Video, already offer both ad-supported and ad-free tiers.

Source: WCCFTech, The Information