Xbox increases Game Pass price and former FTC president had already warned

Microsoft decided to increase the price of Xbox Game Pass, and it was no small feat, with the monthly fee for Ultimate now costing $29.99 in the US, an increase of 50%. This happens at the same time that the company is also changing the prices of Xbox consoles in the American market.

The person who didn’t let it go was Lina Khan, who until recently was head of the FTC, the competition authority in the United States. She was one of the biggest critics of Microsoft’s purchase of Activision Blizzard and has now recalled that, at the time, she had warned that, sooner or later, players would feel the impact of the purchase firsthand. According to Khan, after the merger, there have already been price increases and layoffs, and this ends up harming both consumers and the studios that make the games.

To complicate matters further, Khan also recalled that in 2023 Microsoft itself said in court that the price of Game Pass would not rise because of the acquisition of Activision. A year later, reality shows something else.

On the legal side, the FTC tried to stop the deal in court, but failed. He appealed, lost, and ended up giving up the case. As a result, the purchase of Activision Blizzard ended up being completed in October 2023.

Since then, Microsoft has substantially increased its profits in the video game sector, but at the same time, it has reduced the number of jobs in its gaming division. And there were those who said, as a former employee told Bloomberg, that the company gave up more than $300 million in Call of Duty sales on consoles and PCs last year.

In the end, Microsoft ended up with a huge catalog of games, but players are paying more to access this content.

Source