Microsoft’s determination to destroy the great reputation of Game Pass continues apace, with the news that the corporation has suddenly pulled its years-long offer of a two-week trial subscription for a dollar, just a week before it adds Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 to the subscription.
Cast your mind back to the halcyon days of June, 2024, and you’ll remember that Xbox’s Game Pass was this industry-defining subscription package that gave you access to a vast library of older and brand-new Xbox games, and try as people might, it was hard to find a bad word to say about it. Four months later and its recognition is in tatters—a wildly muddled confusion of tiers, pricing structures, and significant price hikes.
Woven within all of that was the incredibly galling news that it also meant anyone paying for the “Standard” Game Pass offer would lose access to day-one additions which, as Dexerto reminds us, breaks a promise made only in May of this year. To get access to what was long considered a core aspect of Game Pass now costs a vastly higher $20 a month.
By an enormous coincidence, this coincides with the gradual arrival of Activision’s Call of Duty games, following Microsoft’s $69bn purchase of the publisher, and it’s almost as if someone loudly warned that this would happen.
Now, a week before Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 becomes the first day-one Game Pass arrival for the flagship franchise, Microsoft has pulled its almost-free trial.
Trials and tribulations
The timing is outstandingly unlikely to be happenstance. With seven days to go before people will be able to play CoDBlops6 at the $20 tier, the ability to get 14 days’ access for $1 has vanished. Obviously, plenty of people may have jumped on the offer in the next few days, to get themselves extremely cheap access to the new CoD, and it seems very likely that Microsoft didn’t want that. (We’ve contacted them to ask.)
Which is, it seems to me, pretty misguided. Sure, the company would take a financial hit up front as people didn’t pay either the full $70 asking price for a license to play the game, or the regular $20 cost for the month’s access to rent it on Game Pass. But it would almost certainly have brought in vast numbers of new customers who’d want to keep playing the live-service multiplayer game after the first fortnight, and would either then buy it outright, or maintain a full-price subscription. Let alone the droves who’d just forget to cancel, which—and sorry to break your sweet, naive heart—is the main reason you put have to put your credit card details in for any of these super-cheap/free short-term offers.
It’s yet another kick in the ribs to the already down-and-bleeding Game Pass, that has fallen from celebratory “Netflix for games” champion to a confusing mess of mind-boggling tiers and structures.
Some might even go so far as to wonder if it’s actually a good thing to let massive corporations buy each other for the GDP of small nations until all competition is removed from the market.
.
