New Xbox Game Pass Games Slammed: “Do You Expect People to Pay $30 For This?”

Xbox Game Pass has two new games, and subscribers on Xbox One, Xbox Series X, and PC are not impressed. Back in October, Xbox Game Pass Ultimate — the most popular tier of the subscription service with day one games — saw a substantial price hike, bringing it from $20 a month to $30 a month. At the time, many subscribers were upset, and the reception has only worsened since then as the subscription service has not improved in quality. So, Xbox and PC users are paying an extra $120 a year for the same service. In fact, given how slow video game releases have been the last few months, the offering has actually worsened.

2026 has some big games for Xbox Game Pass subscribers — including a long-awaited open-world RPG — but these are still months out. In January, the games have been underwhelming so far, other than Death Stranding. To this end, two new games were added to both Ultimate and Premium on both console and PC yesterday: ANNO: Mutationem and Drop Duchy. And in the comments section of a post highlighting the drop, many subscribers had a pop at the subscription service, criticizing its value.

“Do You Expect People to Pay $30 For This?”

“Damn. Do you expect people to pay 30 for this,” reads one of the comments in question. A second comment adds: “Do you expect me to pay $30 a month for mobile games?”

A third comment further adds: “Game Pass is no value anymore. Forza Horizon 6 is probably the last game I ever buy from any Xbox studio.”

Read Next

Xbox Game Pass Just Added Some of the Best EA Games From the Early 2000s

If you have been paying attention to Xbox Game Pass discourse the last couple months, this is a popular and growing sentiment. And it’s not just exclusive to X. You can find it on Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and just about anywhere Xbox Game Pass is promoted and where there is mass social interaction. Unfortunately, for these subscribers, Xbox Game Pass increased $10 in price not because Microsoft was planning to use this money to improve it, but to cover the costs of inflation, increasing game development prices, and predominantly to cover for a subscription service that is not growing fast enough to be sustainable in the long term.

All of that said, and as always, feel free to leave a comment or two or three letting us know what you think, or join the conversation over on the Comicbook Forum.