Microsoft slashes Xbox Game Pass prices in big strategy shift

Microsoft has slashed the price of Xbox Game Pass in South Africa and globally, less than six months after imposing the steepest price increases in the subscription service’s history.

The climbdown is the first major strategic move under new Xbox chief Asha Sharma, and it comes alongside a significant rollback of one of Game Pass’s headline features: day-one access to new Call of Duty titles.

According to Microsoft’s local Xbox site, Game Pass Ultimate in South Africa has been cut to R239/month, down from R349. PC Game Pass now costs R209/month, down from R249.

The reductions only partially reverse the sharp hikes Microsoft imposed in October 2025, which saw Ultimate jump from R199 to R349 and PC Game Pass surge from R119 to R249 – a 109% increase. Even after this week’s cuts, South African subscribers are paying materially more than they were 18 months ago, particularly for PC Game Pass.

In the US, Ultimate drops to US$22.99/month from $29.99, while PC Game Pass falls to $13.99 from $16.49, Microsoft said in a blog post.

New Call of Duty releases will no longer be included on Game Pass on launch day. Future titles in the franchise will instead be added to the service around a year after release – a reversal of the strategy Microsoft adopted after buying publisher Activision Blizzard for a mammoth $69-billion in 2023.

Strategic shift

The shift is the first major strategic call since Sharma took over Microsoft’s gaming division earlier this year, following a February leadership shake-up that saw the departure of long-serving Xbox boss Phil Spencer and Xbox president Sarah Bond.

The Verge reported last week that in an internal memo to Xbox staff, Sharma acknowledged Game Pass had become too expensive for players.

Read: Microsoft’s winning formula may be starting to fray

That admission is especially true in South Africa. Last October’s increases – which landed on top of another substantial hike the previous year – drew criticism, not least because South African subscribers have never had access to several of the features Microsoft uses to justify the headline price. Unlimited cloud gaming and in-game rewards worth up to $100/year are both unavailable in the country.

Microsoft also halved the catalogue on the middle Premium tier (formerly Standard) as part of the November shake-up and pushed first-party Microsoft titles off day-one release for anyone subscribed below Ultimate. For many subscribers, the combination – higher prices, fewer games and missing features – appears to have been the breaking point.

Microsoft has not publicly disclosed recent Game Pass subscriber numbers, but the scale and speed of the reversal suggest the pricing experiment delivered the opposite of what the company had hoped.

After years of betting that subscription services and cloud gaming would become the next big growth driver for the Xbox brand, Microsoft finds itself trailing Sony and Nintendo in console sales – and now backtracking on the pricing model it had spent years building.  — (c) 2026 NewsCentral Media, with additional reporting (c) 2026 Reuters