 Alright folks, Microsoft did an oopsie. They tried to increase the price of Xbox Live Gold over the last couple of days and received massive backlash and within 24 hours completely backtracked all of their plans. It felt strange at the time that they were doing this price increase because Microsoft up to this point over the past year I would say has been extremely pro consumer, making things cheaper, making Game Pass the best budget delivery of games in gaming and making Xbox, the series S in particular, the best budget console in gaming. In fact due to emulation it's really one of the best budget consoles in gaming. So it's been very interesting to see Microsoft say hey look we're going to bring our quote unquote greedy business practices back in place and start price hiking these services. To be fair a lot of people saw price hikes coming at some point because realistically how can they keep making things so cheap but they thought the price hike would be Game Pass not Xbox Live Gold which wasn't offering you anything extra for that price hike. They were just giving you what's already there which has been completely devalued by Game Pass in the first place and saying now you pay more for it. I think the idea behind it was to push people to be like hey look instead of paying these increased prices just go get Game Pass Ultimate which includes of course gold in it. Well I actually have a thought here and it's not necessarily criticizing them for the attempted price hike and we'll get into all that stuff. It's more so about should Xbox Live Gold even still exist and if other companies start to offer a Game Pass like service which it doesn't sound like Sony or Nintendo are planning to do that but if they did should they also do away with their online services. Does it make sense to run two concurrent subscriptions for online services even though they have some fundamental differences and I actually went and I asked you guys about this as well so we'll get into some of your guys' responsibility before I go any further. We are giving away a PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X or a Nintendo Switch. Details on that are down in the description on how to enter or in the pinned comment. Winner will be announced not selected but announced during a live stream at the end of this month which is coming up pretty quickly. We're already on the 23rd here so we got about a week here to go. Alright let's first off get into what exactly Microsoft tried to do. So this is the official blog and it says no changes. They updated it and we'll get into the update in a bit but here's the original post. It says since we launched Xbox Live 18 years ago we were working to make it the most advanced multiplayer network available for the greatest community of gamers and there are a lot of you. Millions of people come together on Xbox to play with friends and discover great games. We invest in our community by strengthening the digital safety of our players enabling new ways to share, communicate and play with your friends and delivering industry leading reliability across our network. Periodically we assess the value and pricing of our services to reflect changes in regional marketplaces and to continue to invest in the Xbox community we'll be making price adjustments for Xbox Live Gold in select markets. In many markets the price of Xbox Live Gold has not changed for years and in some markets it hasn't changed in over 10 years. So what does this mean to you? If you're an existing online 12 month or 6 month Xbox Live Gold member there's no price change. If you choose to renew your membership it will renew it at your current price. So basically what they were saying is hey if you already have a recurring subscription and it's a you know a 6 month or a 12 month one you're going to get to keep the pricing that you've had this whole time as long as you keep automatically renewing. The price of one month Gold membership was going to increase by $1 USD and the price of the 3 month membership was going to increase by $5 USD or the equivalent amount in your local market. If you'd like to upgrade your Gold membership to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate your remaining Gold time will also convert directly to Ultimate up to 36 months. For example if you have 11 months of Xbox Live Gold now and you upgrade to Game Pass Ultimate those 11 months convert to 11 months of Ultimate at no additional cost. So what was interesting here is that people were actually taking advantage of the whole if you're new to Game Pass join for $1 and what they were doing was buying 3 years worth of you know up to 36 months 3 years of Xbox Live Gold you know cheaply. You can even get it as cheap as $30 bucks 20 bucks sometimes with some websites. So you can get 3 years of Gold and then pay $1 and convert that all in the Game Pass Ultimate and that matters because Game Pass Ultimate doesn't really have like a discount for a year subscription it's straight up if you want Game Pass Ultimate which includes Gold includes EA and also includes obviously Game Pass itself it was going to be $14.99 a month. So it's actually really insane savings that they allowed to do that and plenty of people were taking advantage of it and I thought at first this price hike was maybe like hey we need to curb people just getting Game Pass Ultimate you know so cheap for 3 years. So that's why I thought they initially were doing this but still let's get more into this. Members have already been notified in some regions if you're a region where prices are being adjusted and you will receive an email and message center notification over the next month letting you know the new pricing for your membership going forward. New pricing for one month will be $10.99 3 months will be $29.99 and 6 months will be $59.99 which was interesting because that's exactly a 0% discount over 3 months. Usually when you buy like you know the 3 month and the 6 month and the 12 month you would get a discount. Now they are eliminating the 12 month in this case. You could always visit your account to manage your membership and prices won't adjust until at least 45 days after you receive the messages. So they were trying to increase the price of Gold will not offer you any more features. Now to be clear the primary reason most people have Xbox Live Gold just like they have the Nintendo Switch Online Services or the PlayStation Network stuff from Sony is because they want access to play games online. All games on Xbox at the time of this post were they had online play whether it was free to play like Fortnite or whether it was Call of Duty Online all of it was behind Xbox Live Gold. Now the worst of things you get with Gold right you get games of Gold which were you get two to three free games per month that you can download and you can just use them as long as you're subscribed to Gold. They're only available to download for a limited time but once you have them downloaded you can redownload them all that stuff. So it's like you just keep growing your library every month but you don't control what those games are you don't know what those games are going to be ahead of time most of the time. So PlayStation has a similar thing going on with their system as well but yeah you saw this price tag and you're like man Sony's going to price tag now Nintendo's going to price tag now and they're not offering you anything new they're just charging you significantly more to give you an idea 59.99 for six months that was the price for 12 months. They effectively were doubling the price of a year subscription with that 59.99 for six months. Yeah that didn't go over well. Lots of backlash. So here's their update on it. We messed up. Okay this was less than 24 hours later. We messed up today and you were right to let us know. Connecting and playing with friends is a vital part of gaming and we failed to meet the expectations of players who count on it every day. As a result we've decided not to change Xbox Live Gold pricing. We're turning this moment into an opportunity to bring Xbox Live more in line with how we see player at the center of their experience. For free to play games you will no longer need an Xbox Live Gold membership to play those games on Xbox. This is kind of like a man we're sorry we messed up. We shouldn't have tried to price like free to play games they're not going to be behind gold anymore. So we actually ended up getting a positive out of this but moving on here. We are working hard to deliver this change as soon as possible in the coming months. If you are an Xbox Live Gold member already you stay at your current price for the renewal new and existing members going to continue to enjoy Xbox Live Gold for the same prices they paid today which is $10 or $9.99 for one month, $24.99 for three months, $39.90 for six months or $59.99 for retail 12 months. So there you go. As you see there was a significant price hike going on and they have now backtracked all of that. Now what's interesting here is when you look at what these services are. So first off here's Game Pass right. The reason I feel like they were price-hiking here is because they wanted people to get ultimate. For those who don't know, a lot of people have Game Pass ultimate but you don't have to have ultimate. You can get it for $9.99 on its own. You do not have to have gold to have Game Pass. This is a misnomer that happens because so many people opt for the ultimate because again it says best value and it really is but you can literally just not have Xbox Live Gold but have Game Pass because you'll still get access to all the games. You'll still get the new games added all the time. You'll still get the Xbox games due to your titles the same day as release and you still get member discounts and deals and this is whether you get it on console or PC. So you still get an incredible deal but again all these games you can't play online without Xbox Live Gold. So it's one of those things where it's, yeah there are gonna be some people that don't use Xbox Live Gold and we'll get into that but it's gonna be interesting to see that this is not an option most opt for. They opt for ultimate and why? Well you get the same access except you get it on PC and console. So instead of paying 10 bucks for each one, 15 you get access to both. New games added all the time. You get the Xbox games due to exclusive members. It's going to get free perks including in-game content and partner offers. That's not included in normal Game Pass. Play games on your Android mobile phone and tablet from the cloud. So if you have an Android phone or tablet you can basically use XCloud for free. That's pretty cool huh? So you get XCloud on your phones. You get Ultimate on your PC and console. You get all this stuff. Oh also it includes the gold membership and then it also includes EA Play. Notably the EA Play stuff does not, is not included in standard Game Pass. It's only in Game Pass Ultimate. So I felt like all the price hiking was basically to say get Game Pass Ultimate. Why the hell are you wasting money on anything else? Now it would technically be more expensive to have Ultimate because they're 14 on a month. You extrapolate that over six months. You're actually paying more, right? You'd be paying like 90 bucks versus 60 for six months of gold. But if you're gonna pay 60 for gold why not pay the extra 30 bucks and have Ultimate the whole time? So it's a, it was weird to me. And I wasn't the only one that this was weird to. I don't think that gold needs to exist anymore. I think they should just have Game Pass call it Ultimate or whatever they want. Get rid of, I mean I guess you could still have the individual PC tier maybe. But like, I don't know. They should just not have gold anymore. They should just have Game Pass Ultimate. And people are gonna be pissed because some people don't care about Game Pass Ultimate or Game Pass at all. They just want gold and be done with it. And I get it. I understand that point. And that's the point we're actually gonna get into here. You know, I was looking at gold here to see, you know, if there's anything else on this page. But there really wasn't. But then I asked this question and I said I got an interesting video going up at some point today about Xbox and it's not just about some price changes with gold, which again, we just covered that. One thing I wanted to include is some user poll stuff. So here we go. For those of you that own an Xbox via the one, the one S, the one X or the series S or X, do you use Game Pass? Even for those of you that don't, if you did own one, would you get Game Pass? Do you have gold? Both. All right. So I didn't make this poll as thorough as I should. I should have said, you know, I should have had Game Pass available on its own. I definitely have Game Pass Ultimate. I should have had Game Pass on its own as an option. I apologize about that. So 57% of people who answer this poll, who have an Xbox or intend to buy an Xbox, are going to get Game Pass Ultimate. 17% only have gold. I found this to be interesting because I don't know what the point of having gold is without having Game Pass, but we'll get into some of your comments. I have an Xbox that only, 26% of people say they have an Xbox but they don't use either of those services. And that's baffling to me since Xbox is ecosystem. Everything about the system is built around online and has been that way since the very first Xbox. So I always felt like if you're going to buy an Xbox, you are obviously going to use it online. I guess I was wrong. So let's go into this. So I have Game Pass Ultimate. It's the only reason I use it anymore. I bought a Series S for Game Pass in the occasional digital game on sale. So again, if you own an Xbox, why don't you have Game Pass? I'm being honest, Game Pass is still the greatest budget deal in gaming. We have all these exclusive games that they've announced for the Xbox Series X or at least the Xbox family. They're all coming to Game Pass. Like Game Pass is already incredible. Doom Eternal, game pass. Why spend 60 bucks in Game Pass? Cause you get that and you get so many other games. I have Game Pass. It's the best deal out there for third party games. Nintendo for first party and Xbox for third party games is my choice. All right. Just go on Amazon, get a year of gold for 60 bucks and go buy a month of ultimate for $14. It'll upgrade the whole year to ultimate. Yeah. Again, they had it for a $1 for a while. Maybe they got rid of them. They had the $1 deal still on PC. So maybe you should go get Game Pass Ultimate through PC. There's still a way to take advantage of that 36 month thing. Microsoft needs to make this April Fool's and make online gaming free. And that's kind of where I'm leaning towards is where gold, with Game Pass existing, does gold need to exist? I think that's my question to you guys. Does gold need to exist when Game Pass is a thing? Or should they drop gold? Let online gaming be free like it is on PC but then offer Game Pass and have Game Pass stand on its own. I think it's a worthy conversation starter. Are they going to? No, they have too many millions of people subscribed to gold that aren't Game Pass. But still, I do think that they're trying to get people to switch over to Game Pass Ultimate. One, they make more money. And two, it's actually better for the consumer in a way in terms of access to games. However, the reason there are some people that will refuse to get Game Pass on the stipulation they want to own their games. And I understand that. And I'm sure someone's gonna bring that argument up here. I get Game Pass Ultimate for free through Xbox Rewards. I've had it for free since 2019. And it's still going all the way to 2022. So that's what I'm rocking with. Hopefully I'll get a Series X as my first Xbox. I would get Game Pass, why wouldn't I? I recently bought a Series S solely for Game Pass and I've been absolutely loving it. Again, Game Pass is a great service. Let me see. I played a variety of big games in just one week. Was never a big Xbox guy. Had the original Xbox as a kid, but I went PlayStation after. And now after experiencing Game Pass, I fully intend to swap my Series S for a Series X when they're easier to find. I got an Xbox 360 and I just cleared the story mode of Rascals. I don't know what that was or anything. Game Pass is pretty cool to have. I never really thought I needed it since I've been building my Xbox Game Library since 2007 or 2008. And I understand that to a point, but I also say again, all new games are gonna be on Xbox that come from that are considered to be exclusive to the Xbox family. Those are all going to be on Game Pass. That's one of the major selling points to me anyways, not just the old games. I use Game Pass because it's amazing for playing a wide variety of Indies. Yep, there's a lot of Indie games on there. It's also just a really good deal, even if you're only interested in the future of the late games. I have it since launch on my Series X, but in the future, I will only get it when I want to. I don't want to pay monthly for it. And that's understandable. Some people don't like the monthly subscription and maybe there'll be some months where you just don't play your Xbox. I mean, if we're honest with each other, especially when you're a multi-console gamer, and you own a Switch, PlayStation, Xbox, PC, whatever, there's gonna be no times or months where a certain system might not even get touched. What's nice about Game Pass? Ultimate. Is that it? There's no price discounts if you get it for three months or if you get it for six or a year. There's no price discount. It's all $14.99 a month. So you're not really punished for ending and restarting your subscription if you aren't someone who converted gold over. Let me see here. Damn, now. I know what you're talking about. My opinions. If it was $119, maybe I'd be okay with 120. That's what I was just trolling. I don't even have an Xbox. I had Game Pass for PC for a couple months, but I thought myself never really used it so I stopped playing. Game Pass on PC has also had a lot of issues. I'm not gonna dive into them here, but Game Pass on PC hasn't exactly been a smooth experience. I'm a Game Pass Ultimate member because it's a better value than PlayStation Plus or Nintendo's online service combined. I got a PC now. I don't use my Xbox or PlayStation 4. I was hoping to get more people commenting about how I have an Xbox but I don't have Game Pass and here's why. But instead of all the comments from people saying they love Game Pass. I have Ultimate when I first got X with it. It came out three months. I really liked it. Then when they announced Ultimate, I bought three years ago and then overturned it. Okay. Let's see here. I gave us Ultimate for my PC. Very except for Digital Futures, but a huge investor in the market. Before 25% of what you said, I don't use either subs. Why do you even have the console? That's what I was wondering. Let me see, right now I have X with 360. I don't want to get Series X. Let's see here. They updated. Yep. We talked about that. I'm subscribed to Game Pass Ultimate, but not through the Xbox consoles, but Android via XCloud. Yep. I bought Xbox Series X. I love physical games. I don't have or want any of the Game Pass. Wow. All right. Here's what he said. I bought, here's someone who owns an Xbox but doesn't use Game Pass. I bought the Xbox Series X. I love physical games. I don't have or want any of Game Pass. And I'm pissed that there is games I can't play because Xbox is trying to force me to buy it. That is wrong. One game is Sea of Thieves. I'm not done with this fight either. What are you talking about? What are you talking about? I'm pretty sure you could buy it. Hold on. Is someone trying to argue you can't that there's games on there you can't buy? I'm going to Amazon right now. Sea of Thieves. I'm like, I guarantee you could buy Sea of Thieves. But maybe I'm wrong. But I feel like you could buy Sea of Thieves. Let me, I didn't spell it right. That doesn't help. Sea of Thieves for Xbox One. Yeah. What is he talking about? And they let you free upgrade it. Look, they let you free upgrade it. You get the free upgrade when you buy this. What is he talking about? You can't buy Sea of Thieves physically. What is happening? Is that a thing? It's $34.15. Is that like, I'm sorry. I hate to like call you out. Cory, but you're like, you know, I'm pissed that there are games I can't play because Xbox is trying to force you to buy. They do force you to buy Xbox Gold. But you don't need Game Pass for Sea of Thieves. Yes, Sea of Thieves is on Game Pass right here. I could buy Sea of Thieves right now. Add to cart, physical version. Look, the physical version of Sea of Thieves right here. What are you talking about? I'm confused. Someone correct me if I'm wrong. Well, since when can't you buy the physical version? Why don't brothers, as I'm with you on this, I don't have Gold currently, but I've had it in the past. I love collecting physical games. They have no interest in subscription services for games. I don't download the so-called free games and I've even paid for a physical copy for games that were available through Gold at the time. Raising the price for live Gold is even worse for gamers that stick to physical. Well, it's not, they ended up not raising it, but I get not wanting to pay for online, but that's a grander argument here because everyone, even Nintendo now, makes you pay to play games online. So if you're gonna get an online game like Sea of Thieves, you're gonna have to pay for Gold. But, like, what do you talk about Game Pass and like, you can't play Sea of Thieves as well? Yes, you can. You can't play with an Xbox Live Gold. But that's been, I mean, where have you been? That's been since the OG Xbox. That's not even new. And PlayStation and Nintendo are doing the same things. You wanna play Splatoon online? Splatoon 2 online? Better have a subscription. Ultimate's nice. So this is like, I was looking for someone to give a good argument, but then, like, this argument didn't even hold up when they mentioned their one example because you can totally buy that game. Let's see here. Don't own Xbox. Yeah, that was like the only. Grow up, you're a proper man, baby. That's like, I should, like, put this, I should, like, put that comment in the thumbnail. Maybe I will just for fun. I'm a man, baby, because I asked a question about Xbox, you know? Maybe it's just because they're still complaining that I covered the GameXplain situation. People can be funny sometimes. I think that it's just, we need to get Gold killed off and just stick with Game Pass. I think Game Pass is incredible. I understand for people that want to own everything physically, that Game Pass might as well not even exist. It's not going to do anything for them, but it's also not going to hurt you. They're still offering the games. Until they get to a point that they don't offer a physical or digital download way to buy these games, or both, ideally both, and they're only available in Game Pass. That's when you can maybe complain. I have yet to see or hear about a game that is exclusively on Game Pass. That hasn't happened yet. Until it does, I wouldn't really worry about it. Once it does, I think the complaints are valid and I think people are worried things are going to head in that direction and maybe they will, but we don't have any evidence or proof to suggest that. Ultimately, I enjoy my Xbox. I play my Xbox slightly more than my Switch right now, but that'll change once you know, Super Mario 3D World is here and some other games come out that are hot fire on Switch that I'm looking forward to. But right now, I'm enjoying Game Pass Ultimate. I think it's the greatest value in gaming. I think it's the primary reason to own an Xbox. If you're looking at, oh, third-party games are gonna perform better. Well, some third-party games perform better on PlayStation 5 than the Series X. Some perform better on the Series X than the PlayStation 5 and Hitman 3 or something. Some recent game that came out performs better on Series X now than PlayStation 5, whereas I know some of the launch games were better like Assassin's Creed Valhalla was better initially on PlayStation 5. So I honestly am just at this point where we have a lot of subscriptions, right? How many of you guys have like, like I have Nintendo Switch online. I'm just talking about, let me talk about all the things I'm subscribed to right now that I pay a monthly fee for, okay? If not like a three-month or six-month renewal, whatever, you know, things I'm subscribed to that cost money. All right, that are services, services. So I've got Xbox Live Gold and I've got Game Pass. I got them together as Game Pass Ultimate so we'll count that as one thing. So I have Game Pass Ultimate. I have Nintendo Switch online, okay? I have Netflix, I have Hulu, I have Amazon Prime, okay? I also have, that's five of them, I have more. Maybe that's it. Maybe I only have five active right now. I think, I used to have Disney Plus, don't have Disney Plus currently. I only activate Disney Plus when there's something I really want to watch but Disney Plus is cheap but I only activate it when there's something I really want to watch. So I guess I only have, I guess I only have five right now but still that's five. If you think about it, let's just say they only cost on average 10 bucks a month which they cost more than that. You know, that's 50 bucks a month. But we all know it's gonna, after you add everything together it's a lot closer to almost 100 bucks a month and that doesn't include the fact that I pay for internet every month. That doesn't include the fact that I also happen to have cable, right? You know, I don't pay for a streaming TV service because they always seem to be missing channels I want for sports so I just pay for cable which you know, that's another fee on top. Oh yeah, I also have Apple TV. I don't use it that often but I have it for a year. So when it's done I'll probably be done with it unless they start to add more shows I care about. So there we go, that's what I was forgetting about. Apple TV. So I have a lot of these subscription services and this doesn't include things like if you happen to have a Spotify paid account or something, right? I don't have any paid Spotify or Pandora accounts or anything but some people do. Think about all the subscriptions we have and how nickel and dime we get to the point where yeah, it's nice that you can just pay for what you want but what you want is on such a wide variety of services. I mean, someone out there's gonna get me too soon. Why are you paying for Hulu and not doing the Hulu Disney Plus combo? It's like a similar price. I know, I know, okay? Don't remind me. Anyways, yeah, I would like to see Xbox Live Gold go. I would like to see Game Pass be the only thing that I would like to see online go free to play like it is on PC. Like it should have been on consoles this whole time. If it wasn't for Microsoft deciding they could charge money for it. So we'll see what happens. I'm glad the price hike didn't occur and I'm curious on your thoughts on this down on the console. This is an extra long video about Xbox Live. I did not plan for this to be a 20 plus minute video when I started out but you know what? Things happen. The gaming landscape is an ever evolving thing and I feel like it's important we keep following it. If you follow me for Nintendo content, hey, I also talk about other gaming content as well and I can't wait to get my hands on the PlayStation 5 here myself, not just for the giveaway but for myself. So I can finally talk about that, kind of do a review of that and compare experiences across all three platforms. All right folks, I'll catch you guys in the next video.