Kicking You While You're Down: Xbox Quietly Guts CoD Benefits After Game Pass Price Hike
Just when you thought the Game Pass dumpster fire couldn't get any hotter, Microsoft has casually strolled by and tossed another can of gasoline on it.
After spending a day writing about the mass cancellations and player boycotts following the insane 50% price hike, I thought I'd seen the worst of it. I was wrong. It turns out, while jacking up the price of Game Pass Ultimate to $30, Microsoft also quietly removed the 10% discount subscribers used to get on Call of Duty Points and BlackCell bundles.
Death by a Thousand Paper Cuts
They didn't announce this change. It wasn't in their fancy new graphic explaining the tiers. They just took it away, hoping nobody would notice. This is the kind of sneaky, cowardly bullshit that absolutely destroys any remaining goodwill. They want you to pay more for the service, while simultaneously making the things you buy within that service more expensive.
It's a masterclass in corporate self-destruction. The message is clear: they don't just want more of your money; they think you're stupid enough not to notice them picking your pocket while your back is turned.
It Was Always About Call of Duty
This whole mess is starting to make a dark kind of sense. As I said in my opinion piece yesterday, this feels like a desperate course correction. Putting Black Ops 6 on Game Pass day-one last year was a huge gamble, and I'd bet my career it cost them a catastrophic amount of money in direct sales.
Now, they're panicking. With Black Ops 7 locked in for a day-one release, they can't reverse that decision. So instead, they're trying to salvage the situation by gutting the service around it. They’re jacking up the subscription price, delaying other first-party games on cheaper tiers, and now, stripping away the CoD-specific perks. It all points to a company that massively underestimated the cost of its biggest acquisition and is now passing the bill directly to us.
Reading the Room With a Blindfold
The sheer tone-deafness is staggering. While players were literally breaking Microsoft's website trying to cancel their subscriptions, the Xbox dashboard was reportedly greeting them with full-page ads praising the "more rewards" of the new, more expensive service. It's like a landlord raising your rent by 50% and then leaving a pamphlet on your door about the "value" of having a roof.
What happened to Xbox? It feels like we're right back in the dark days of the Xbox One launch, where every decision seemed designed to alienate their core audience. This isn't just another strategic misstep by microsoft, it's a complete and utter failure to read the room. They've taken the "best deal in gaming" and turned it into a punchline at the end of a bad joke.