Xbox Game Pass Ultimate should be an easy choice, but Microsoft is making me reconsider my Sub

Microsoft recently announced that Xbox Game Pass Ultimate prices are climbing from a high of $20 per month An eye-watering $30. “Real” gamers on the internet have already made a joke about it: “Xbox $360 a year.”

But while the joke writes itself, it took me a lot more effort to determine whether Game Pass was still worth it to me at this new price. Yes, the company has also added new incentives and moved some features, but do these additions create value or just create more confusion? Let's break things down.

Currently, Xbox Game Pass Ultimate includes access to all Microsoft-published games on their respective release dates, as well as many others. It also includes subscriptions to EA Play, Ubisoft Classics, and soon fortnite All hands on deck. With Ubisoft Classics priced at $80 per year, EA Play at $40 per year, and Fortnite Crew at $144 per year, the total value of these subscriptions is $264, which definitely helps add to the $360 per year spent on Game Pass – if you actually use them.

Let's talk about the subscriptions that come with Ultimate and what they mean. First up is Ubisoft Classics. If you check out the Ubisoft Classics website, you'll see that the standard subscription package costs $7.99 per month, but only offers PC games. However, the premium version of Ubisoft Classics offers both PC and Xbox games for a total of $17.99 per month. Xbox Claims its Ubisoft Classics version will increase by $7.99 per month valuable Every platform, meaning players who play on both PC and Xbox can get the most bang for their buck. With the Game Pass version of Ubisoft Classics, you get access to the standard version's rotating menu of games instead of the 100-plus games promised in Ubisoft Premium (which is usually the premium version). Yes, you can access it on PC and Xbox, but you have access to a smaller library of games, and it's the standard version rather than the premium version. Microsoft wants you to think of this as $15.98 per month value, but with all of these caveats, it's hard to take seriously the quoted “$7.99 per platform per month” value.

EA Play, meanwhile, is even simpler. Through EA, the subscription costs $5.99 per month and comes with a 10-hour trial of new games and “unlimited access to a range of top EA games,” which is what Xbox Game Pass Ultimate appears to be offering as well.

However, in standalone versions, both programs offer discounts on Ubisoft and EA games respectively; there's no word yet on whether these discounts will apply to Game Pass subscribers. We're guessing they won't, though, because as part of the price increase, Xbox is also Game and DLC discounts canceled Previously included as part of the service.

The situation with Fortnite Crew is a bit more complicated. If you subscribe to Fortnite Crew for a full year, you'll get access to all Battle Passes for the year, as well as 1,000 V-Bucks each month (12,000 total for the year) and 12 unique Fortnite Crew outfits. While this sounds like a good deal, even if you play a lot of Fortnite, it's still not worth it. That's because, as a Crew member, not all the rewards you receive are created equal—the Fortnite Battle Pass and Crew rewards are both one-time items, and you probably won't care about filling out their offerings. Most of these rewards are not like scooby doo or power rangerswhich are generic, non-copyright-infringing characters and songs.

You have to love Crew costumes, use Jam Tracks, play LEGO Fortnite mode, and complete the battle pass to really get your money's worth. In short, Fortnite Crew costs $144 and includes about $100 worth of V-Bucks, some skins you probably won't use, some Lego bricks you probably won't use, and Jam Tracks you may or may not care about.

Regular Fortnite players (myself included) will often purchase the Crew Pass to complete a season of the Battle Pass and receive the corresponding reward V-Bucks. But as an ongoing subscription, you must extremely Investing in Fortnite is about justifying Crew.

Now, when it comes purely to the games Microsoft releases, Game Pass certainly makes a pretty strong case for itself. This year alone has brought us public declaration, The Elder Scrolls IV: Annihilation, Doomsday: Dark Agesand War Machine ReloadedI would be remiss if I didn’t mention this Ninja Gaiden 4, call of duty black ops 7, The Outer World 2and guardian Everything is just around the corner. This also doesn’t include the various third-party games coming to Xbox Game Pass on day one, such as Chiaroscuro: Expedition 33 and Hollow Knight: Silk Song. But again, the exact “value” here is subjective – you'd have to play a lot of these games to really figure it out.

Coincidentally, shortly after the Game Pass price increase, Circana released a study that found Most U.S. gamers buy two or fewer new games per year. Of course, there's a lot of nuance to this statistic, but at the same time, when most gamers say they spend around $140 a year on new games, does the average gamer really find value in spending $360 a year just to get a handful of those games temporarily?

It's also worth noting that we can't expect Microsoft to release that many games next year or the year after. This may happen, but again we discuss potential value.

To get the most value from Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, you pretty much have to use it to the exclusion of other gaming services, and that's not how most gamers use the service. Personally, I tend to prefer games published by Microsoft; by the end of the year, I'll have played all five of the Microsoft-published games mentioned above, as well as a bunch of other third-party Game Pass games. I also play Fortnite a lot of And tend to play games on Xbox instead of PlayStation. I'm one of the very few cases where I can do this perhaps Justifying the “Xbox $360” price tag. But even so, I was hesitant.

Early on, Game Pass felt like a steal: You only had to play a game or two to justify the cost. Everything else is just gravy. However, as prices go up, the math gets more complicated – it feels like you're convincing yourself that you're handing your wallet to someone who says he'll definitely bring it back, no worries. If that doesn't solve your problem, the variability and ephemerality of service will.

game pass was The best prices on console games. Now, it is one Work on console gaming – but only in very specific circumstances.