Xbox First-Party Games Are Officially Getting A Price Increase In 2023

@Kaloudz would make sense but by keeping it the same it would maybe get more subs....and everyone loves subscription cash each month. Well have to wait and see, i soley play gamepass and don't care much for the increase in games....the GPU price is what I want to know about

Remember when Sony did this and was hammered by the media. I expect the same energy for a company who took 2 years to release something.
But yeah no rush on playing anything. I will wait for the price drop and get for free with Reward points at some point

me personally ive never had a problem with $70 games they go down in price and i can choose to wait and buy at a cheaper price then i get a cheaper fully patched game

How much is $69.99 USD in real money?

I always think back to Street Fighter 2 special championship edition on the Megadrive costing £59.99 back in the early 90's. Games are good value today if you research your buying decisions appropriately. Gamepass is incredible value for money, even with a £/$5 a month price hike, it still would be great value.

Ok this just means I'll play the game(s) two or three years from now.

$69 for a game is just ridiculous. To put in perspective. That is approximately 25% the cost of a Series S.

This is going along the lines of my predictions:

▪️Games will start selling for $70
▪️Game Pass Ultimate will eventually become the only plan (legacy accounts grandfathered, but no more $10 PC or XBox plans)
▪️Xbox Live will be phased out, will require Game Pass Ultimate instead. Legacy accounts grandfathered.
▪️Game Pass Ultimate Family Plan finally rolled out to all regions, $25 a month.

@Phantasystar77 although I’m sure some people do, I don’t think Microsoft expects any game pass subscriber to ever buy their first party games.

I buy all games I want to play, even if they are on game pass, except first party games because those will never leave the service. Only first party games I will buy are ones that will have expiring licenses (like, I own Forza Horizon 3)

Honestly, if anyone in todays world expected any less, then you need to educate yourselves. Price increases are a natural part of business and should be expected at any given time. This is no news to me and as long as the games i want to play keep coming out, i will gladly pay for them.

This is why I never complained about $70 games on PS5. I knew Xbox would follow suit. Nintendo probably will for their next console, too.

@Tharsman What does the term Grandfather mean here?

We all knew this was coming. Gamepass price increase is imminent.

I’ll just play them on Gamepass otherwise I’d be waiting for sales like I do with PS5 games. I’m way past rushing out to play games day one at full price, especially in todays climate when most are filled with bugs and need a couple of patches.

This also means Xbox games will be and should be held to a higher standard than they have been. £70 games riddled with microtransactions like most Xbox games are now will be a bigger joke than it already is.

I said it about Activision and Ubisoft, I'll say it about Microsoft. $69.99 games = instant skip until it is $49.99 or less.

Sure I have Gamepass, but just like with Halo Infinite, had it pre-ordered until they said you couldn't play with a disc. Canceled it immediately after.

Does it really matter when they are on gamepass lol

@uptownsoul considering the S is already being discounted to 250 USD or less. I really don’t see the console or at least the S getting a price adjustment. Not to mention the only place Sony didn’t raise prices was the States. Which is where the bulk of Xboxes sell.

@Fenbops agreed. If you going to charge higher priced games should be higher quality.

@StylesT Gamepass does soften the blow for those of us that have it and I’m glad it’s an option, still sh*t for people that don’t though and there’s plenty of them.

Greedy billion $ companies acting as expected.

Dreadful, but inevitable I suppose.

I'm just here for the mental gymnastics.

Time to find a new cheaper hobby.

@Rmg0731 exactly I wanna see that same energy that this entire site had for playstation.

I mean, certainly not a surprise, I'm sure there will be plenty of fake outrage lol, but this has been coming for a long time. Seems like Microsoft held out a long time. Nintendo will do the same, probably starting with their next system. Personally i rarely buy new anyway, but that's just me.

Will this really make a difference? No one buys xbox exclusives these days as they are on gamepass and I'd wager 90% of xbox gamers have gamepass. Hence why there is never an xbox exclusive in the sales charts.

They would of been better off raising the price of gamepass.

Unless....

They have done this to turn more people (remaining 10%) towards gamepass.....

All the more reason to sub to Game Pass when these first party exclusives hit the service day and date, I’m expecting Game Pass to increase from £10.99 to £15.99 a month and I’m fine with that given the amount of games on the way in 2023 and beyond.

As others have said above it's not a surprise. The first console I was actually spending my own money on games for was the N64 and the equivalent cost of those is over £100 now.

With GPU currently at £10.99 a month, which includes these titles day one, I have no real issue.
The issue is if they start to up the price of GPU, which is inevitable at this point.
Netflix Premium is £15.99 here in the UK. I'd say that has to be the limit for GPU as a comparison.

@Moonglow wrong 2k was the first company to raise games prices to $70, second sony actually make quality exclusive be it cross gen or not. Plus I guarantee these games won't go into gamepass because gamepass was never meant to be a permanent selling point it was just a hold me over until xbox got their crap together in the exclusive department.

@Moonglow Xbox has basically released nothing. the minute a few good games are due, they suddenly have to put up prices. convenient no?

or cynically increase prices right after Black Friday console sales?

so yeah they deserve it as much

I mean Gamepass means it’s not a big deal. But really these blanket increases should actually depend on the game. Something like GOWR on PS or hopefully Starfield, are worth it. But LOU Part 1 etc not so much.

I loved Forza Horizon 5, it’s such a good game, but no way the price should be higher. Halo Infinite definitely not. It’s all getting a bit silly really.

@StylesT not everyone wants to pay for a subscription to rent games

This is disappointing, and maybe most disappointing is this guarantees Switch 2 games will be $70 as well. Imagine paying $70 for a 2D Kirby sidescroller that never goes on sale. We'll be doing it!

For Xbox the proposition is definitely less bad than it is on other platforms, at least at the current GP price, since the price of 2.5 games covers the whole year's sub including those games. It becomes a matter of if you really just want to play 1 or 2 big games a year or if it's worth it to get them all and a bunch of other stuff. But it's still really nasty as long as discounts aren't fast and steep. There's really a point where a product prices itself out of reality. We're just about there in gaming, as it becomes more a toy of the rich rather than a mainstream activity, or "new" is a toy of the rich and everyone else buys the year or two old products at sane prices. Which is ok-ish, but did gaming really need to become like everything else in the world? It was nice the way it was before.

@UltimateOtaku91 this just confirms that all zenimax & eventually Activision games will be 70 at launch (they would've been without the acquisitions anyway lol) but we know Microsoft aren't going to be the good guys & reverse the price hike on them

Hate to break it to people, but you can't expect to inflate the dollar/euro/fiat of choice and not see prices increase. They have increased dramatically for commodities. It was a matter of time before entertainment costs increased.

@Doublecell I can't help but laugh at you. This is just a horrendously bad take that completely misses the mark. If you think raising the price of games $10 is a bad look, how would Xbox look if they pulled the rug out from under gamepass and didn't put any of these games on the service. That would kill Xbox brand 100%, dead in the water, done, there's no coming back from that. Gamepass is Xbox's future business model, not a stop gap measure.

He said "one of the first". And then you say well at least Sony makes good games. Just leave please, you're obviously not here to do anything but troll. GFY

@Would_you_kindly Well if they don't like to save money by doing the obvious thing and playing games through gamepass they haven't got much footing to stand on moaning about a £10 increase

If the games are top end AAA say similar to GOW then I don’t mind the price increase at all.
Have always said that when Sony put their prices up.
Bring the top quality and I will pay.
Now the big one no Halo Infinite half baked jobs please, for £70 UK the games have to be at almost their best they can be for me to buy.

Having said that I have game pass but if I didn’t then the above would stand. Saying that to keep game pass, they need to up their AAA anyway.

The only first party in two years worth £70 is Forza Horizon 5. So if they want game sales they definitely need to bring their best games at top end AAA.

@CunningPig yeah I still by what I said those games are not going into games but believe what you want just like you didn't believe they would raise prices to begin with.

@NEStalgia Gaming has always been expensive. Games were regularly $50 for snes, $60 for n64. It's cheaper now, comparatively, by a lot.

According to an online inflation calculator:

1st numbers are game cost in USD at system launch year, 2nd numbers are adjusted for inflation

NES (1986) $30-50 = $81-136

SNES (1991) $50-60 = $109-131

N64 (1996) $50-60 = $95-114

PS2 (2000) $50-60 = $86-104

Xbox 360 (2005) $60 = $92

@UltimateOtaku91 what do you mean Xbox exclusives are never on sales charts??

They are rarely if ever on charts that only count physical retail sales, but they are constantly charting on Steam. You can also keep your eye on Microsoft’s own top paid page in the future (whenever they release something new) to see if their games end up charting or not during their launch windows.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-US/store/top-paid/games/xbox

@Doublecell I never believed prices wouldn't increase, because I took basic economics class as a child.

It was to be expected. But xbox (and sony) first party titles drop in value very quickly and can be get at much more reasonable prices in the holiday season. That is, unless you don’t want to wait for price drops

I don’t think they will increase GPU for a while.
What they are actually hoping for is the game price increase will encourage more to take up a GPU subscription, with a nice slogan
“ It’s a cheaper way to play” 😂😂😂
I will let Xbox use that free if they ever decided to make an advert for tv.

A price increase on anything is never fun, but it was inevitable. At least we do have Game Pass to soften the blow; The price increase on Playstation has removed a bit of the urgency for me to get a PS5. Perhaps by the time I do, they'll have some of their newer releases on PS Premium Plus Plus.

@CunningPig I'm tired of people regurgitating rhetoric over and over without an independent thought involved. You can't just take goods, especially discretionary goods and just blanket apply "inflation" as though prices on all things can or should infinitely rise. Available discretionary spend per capita has never been so low. What we're seeing with many goods, and gaming is joining that now, is leaning into the new normal of "two economies" where there's one economy where an extra $10,000 is a minor inconvenience, and one, as the retailers keep highlighting, that stopped buying discretionary goods across the board and dropped to store brand groceries primarily. Gaming kind of straddled a line of middle of the road mass market, but is leaning very hard and very rapidly into trying to become luxury goods for a luxury economy, sidestepping the mass market.

Of course while for most of the industry that basically shoots broadside into the idea of real growth, it DOES happen to play into Microsoft's market of pushing gaming as a subscription service and cost cutting model. Raising retail prices may work for catering to a monied portion of the market and moving gaming up-market, but it also has the add-on effect of pushing the subscription based future much much faster.

@Phantasystar77 as it stands, having a PS5 and XSX, I will play anything on Xbox if it’s available there, so I got plenty of stuff to play, inside and outside of game pass.

As far as “managing studios”, I would love to see someone back that up. The only studio that is doing poorly in my eyes is 343. Delays do not mean mismanagement. Let’s not forget last year was rather poor for Sony precisely because Horizon, GoW and GT were all delayed from their original launch reveals.

Anyways my point was simply about the price being an issue for anyone subscribed to game pass. Even if I wanted to own a first party game pass game, you have all the time in the world to wait for a sale.

@NEStalgia
If you look at the Switch released 6 years ago
There are not actually many games I would pay £70 for, so they would need to vastly increase their top end AAA in house overall production values etc.

I mean definitely BOTW, Mario Odyssey and MK8, probably Luigi Mansion 3 but that’s it for me.
Even then I’m thinking £70 for games at 1080p if we lucky, unstable frame rates and textures and graphics from years old. No HDR No VRR.
No real surround sound the list goes on.

Then before we ask Nintendo to up to level of top PS5 production we need to think, they haven’t got the studio sizes, experience etc. It would 10 years for next big Zelda or Mario platform at least.

No way they would get £70 for Kirby, Yoshi, tennis, football even Splatoon 3.

Ok now we got the price increase out the way.
Let see some new gameplay from
Redfall, Forza and Starfield and some promoting.
They are all due before end of June 2023.
Let’s see the £70 worth.

@NEStalgia But they haven't increased with inflation, for most of 30 years games have been about the same actual dollar amount. NES system cost $200 at launch. Series S cost $299. I disagree that it's pricing itself out of the discretionary budget of regular people, even if wealth disparity creates more people with less discretionary income.

@Tharsman yeah I was referring to the weekly physical charts, a place they used to be on a lot during the 360 gen. Gamepass has eliminated almost all boxed sales for 1st party titles in my opinion, which is fine as it seems that's what Microsoft want to do in terms of a subscription based/digital future

@IronMan30 Maybe if you and more people should have complained… If y’all did, we wouldn’t be in the situation. But nah, games sales continued to climb even with the price hike.

It's a great way to either gain more cash or push more people to subscribe to Game Pass. They have said they are not seeing the 'growth' on consoles they expected so by pushing up the prices, they are also raising the 'value' of Game Pass. It does give you a bigger discount too if you wish to purchase it at a later date and faced with spending $200+ to play Redfall, Starfield and Forza day and date or play on Game Pass for a small monthly fee, that may persuade those who haven't yet subscribed to do so and therefore MS get the 'growth' they hoped for....

@UltimateOtaku91 360 gen was a long time ago. No XBox game charts when looking at physical sales, it’s not a secret that these days Xbox users favor digital by a way bigger margin than other console users.

@Dezzy70 Disagree, we're taking Nintendo. They know their IP commands top dollar and are far from the rebuilding phase of Wii. They'll charge industry standard, have no sales, and still dominate charts. TBH they could get away with selling their games for that price easier than MS will. I don't like it but they're in their Apple phase but. They could charge $500 for a Pikachu themed switch wallpaper and it would sell.

@CunningPig PC games were $40 a scant 20 years ago. Then console games went up $10 to cover console fees and resale value. Now it's up to $70 while they become PC games, now, digitally, with no resale. 75% increase within 20 years. You're right, that's not matching inflation, it's a multiple of it. Comparing to NES carts that were solid state daughter boards with EPROM and video coprocessors aren't a direct comparison to digital licenses and lacquer discs.

This was only a matter of time. The real story will be when Game Pass goes higher in price. If they can keep it to around $20-25 I think they will be fine. Any higher might get people to instead opt for waiting on steep sales instead of a subscription service.

@Floki I rarely buy games at full price, anyway.

Whelp, good thing I just did the 3 years of Gamepass for ~$150 trick the other day. No worrying about these prices for a while.

Just don't mess with the sale price format. I still expect the $40 sales about 6 months or a year later then $30 or $20 sales sometime in the 2nd year.

Don't be like Nintendo (and Sony lately) and keep them full price for eternity and call $49.99 a steep discount.

Silly question as I'm newer to Xbox, but don't their games go on sale shortly after anyway?

@NintendoByNature
I don't buy any game until it is at least 50% off. With the price increase I will wait til 60% off. Sometimes it doesn't take long to get there, other times it takes many months. And some are over a year.

But, for the most part if you wait 3 months you can usually get a strong deal on the games.

@NintendoByNature yea they do quite often. The issue is that it’s new base price. But yeah you can wait for a sale.

"This price reflects the content, scale, and technical complexity of these titles..." Is the reason, then why on Earth do the vast majority of AAA titles on launch are buggy as hell, unplayable, and missing a host of features expecting players to pay further in "season passes" as well as mandatory patch updates of xxGBs that can take hours on end? And now have the gall to increase prices to $US70?
Developers / publishers should get their act together and release their AAA games in proper playable states first and foremost with zero missing features and then it would be worth the new asking price.

@ShaiHulud
USD is real money.
But $69.99 doesn't mean anything in the US when you still have to factor in tax on top of it.
tax can be up to 18% more.

Was listening to the Xbox two podcast earlier today and a take they had sounds very intriguing: why would Microsoft announce this today? This is the king of news you bury on a late Friday release.

Their hypothesis is that this Thursday Xbox will likely be announcing release dates for at least one game, if not more, and open preorders. Revealing this now prevents the Thursday reaction from being all about the $70 price tag if the preorder(s).

At minimum, we might get a release date for Red Fall, maybe also for StarField or Forza Motorsport.

Btw I was thinking it would be a rather fun trailer if the Starfield trailer started as the last one ended, with the 11.11.22 date, and then the pilot punched the console a few times, with the date getting updated to the new date.

It's annoying but realistically you'll be able to find them cheaper at certain retailers and they do at least go down in price over time unlike Nintendo games. Nintendo still charges £39.99 for One Two Switch and £49.99 for ARMS. Two unsuccessful games that came out in 2017

@NEStalgia So, don't compare them to cartridges, but compare console games to pc games? A single video game for a console is, or soon will be, $10 more than a single video game for a console was in 1991. That's what moms, who are now grandmas, see at the store. They don't know or care what's inside the box other than it's a video game for the kid. The cumulative rate of inflation is ~115% since then, the price of a console game will have gone up 17%. Zelda A link to the Past cost $59.99 at launch. Zelda Breath of the Wild cost $59.99 at launch.

@CunningPig while prices may have been higher in the past when you take inflation into account gaming has also become much more mainstream than it used to be & a big increase in sales will offset that just look at the latest cod as an example there's no way they needed to charge £70 for it to make a huge profit but greed is in their DNA lol

@Tharsman I like your idea for the date change and the fact I’m not the only one who thinks about how they do these things.

I always wanted Metroid Prime to be announced with Reggie standing on a Wii Board and being asked, “is your body ready?”

And he replies, “No, my body is Primed!”

That's why they held all their first party games back this year.

@CunningPig And discretionary spend wasn't nearly as low back then. Housing, the biggest cost, has soared over 500%, gas was under $0.90, healthcare was actually...paid! etc. etc. Pensions still existed. At the time, video game rental remained how a lot of people played games, and Nintendo, the only meaningful console in town, was happy if you bought Mario and Zelda and called it a console and actively limited the number of games available on the system, and video game consoles were a small niche primarily for kids with little competition for the gaming dollar. You're comparing the landscape of a completely different industry. That era died. "Consoles" today are just custom PCs, and the games are PC games, largely, literally, the continuations of PC series, with the same games as PC, which was not the case with "console" back then. (Elder Scrolls! Fallout! Diablo! AoE! We're on a Microsoft forum for crying out loud!) If we're going to compare prices of games, we literally can compare SAME SERIES from the same studios when they were $40 on PC, we don't need to go back and compare the price of Mario 3 on a solid state NES cartridge for a comparison, nor can we omit the amount of rental, used, and clearance sales that counted as "sales" in 1991, that factors significantly less so when comparing to the PC games and digital sales that these series are.

But each industry also doesn't live in a bubble and you can't just place an inflation multiple per dollar to compare pricing, costs, and consumer buying power between a 30 year span and call it a wrap, to compare other common media, media is a category that has not been consumed by inflation much at all, where video games is an outlier that seems bent on stratifying itself:
Music 1991. That actually reflects a controversial $1 price increase in 1991 coming off the 1989 inflation. The increase did not go down well at the time:
tapes were $9-11 (What most people bought)
CDs were $14-16. (At the time was super elite)
Today: MP3s (what most people buy, which itself is fairly rare with streaming having replaced it for peanuts): $10-12.

Also to compare controversial $1 price increases in music, Apple just raised the price of their streaming by $1. Much less controversial than in 1991, to a whopping $11/mo for unlimited music.

Paperback pulp books were around $12 a copy. Today, eBooks, the modern replacement is $7-12.

Video, back then VHS was around $39-40 after it's eye watering $80 launch period for the super early adopters/elite. Then eventually dropped to 15-20 in its waning days. DVD launched at $40. New release today DVD or digital? Around $20.

Media prices, and consumer price expectations, other than video games has FALLEN in price over that time. That excludes the impact of streaming, which, Microsoft is the key player in moving gaming to that market as well, and Brad Smith just compared PlayStation vs Xbox as Blockbuster vs Netflix, so I don't think it's unfair to compare the video game market to the movie and music markets, given MS itself is doing so in a legal argument.

So among media peers, only video games is moving backward and calling it progress.

@mousieone @NeoRatt sounds like we just gotta be patient and play the waiting game, then.

No thanks, I'll wait for the inevitable sale. Microsoft should receive the same level of criticism that Sony got over the past 2 years.

Game of the year editions will start becoming more popular. Why not wait a year for all the content and bugs to be worked out at a discount price. I will never pay $70 for a game. I'm sure there are many like me.

Most inflation is due to corporate greed. I won't be rewarding this behavior.