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Microsoft has come under considerable amounts of fire lately for both making Xbox Game Pass Ultimate more expensive and raising the US price of the Xbox Series X. Game Pass Ultimate is now 50% higher, while an Xbox Series X will run you 30% more in the United States.
As you can probably gather, players, subscribers and fans aren't happy about any of this. Among the detractors is Laura Fryer, former long-time Microsoft employee and co-founder of Microsoft Game Studios, who put up a video explaining her thoughts and how she believes the company has become misguided.
She starts by boldly stating the top brass at Xbox appears to be in a "bubble" that's out of touch with the community, before discussing the official announcement video for the pricing alterations. "In fairness, they got right. They gave their fans the freedom to choose, and they have, they’ve left," Fryer states.
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"Not one fan asked for their Game Pass prices to be raised by 50%, or for the price of the Xbox to go up by 30%. This tone-deaf video is further confirmation the bubble at Xbox is real, with leadership that doesn’t understand what made them great."
According to Fryer, a "yes man culture" began festering in 2008, and has since taken hold of the brand in the years since, resulting in the Microsoft we now know. Looking at the launch of Halo 2, she discusses how the Xbox once represented something cool and innovative, fostering a culture of multiplayer parties and all-nighters through Xbox Live and third-party partnerships that’s since vanished.
Now, Fryer argues, the messaging just isn't substantive enough. "'This is an Xbox' is destroying all of the brand value built over the years," she states. "It was meant to be an inclusive message where everyone is welcome, but it ended up hollowing out the brand, because if everything is an Xbox, then nothing really is."
Which brings her onto Game Pass, and the 'Netflix for games' comparison. Unlike Netflix, which has gradually scaled up over years to become the primo service it is now, where Xbox "bet billions on new content" and tethered Game Pass to consoles, even through the hardware market was shrinking.
"Xbox didn't reinvent [itself] by replacing the old engine with a better one, they just abandoned what they had and started chasing what they didn't understand," she muses. An obstacle now, she states, is the lack of first-party blockbuster games to pick up the slack.
"With this last increase to Game Pass, Xbox threw away one of their last advantages: they were the best deal in gaming," Fryer adds. "These price hikes feel like a betrayal. Greed over gaming."
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