Guess what? Gym memberships are really expensive if you only go once a week too. I probably shouldn't have used this as an example cause you probably think gym memberships are terrible too but meh. It's the same idea. Subscription vs buying all of the equipment.

If your goal is to actually get fit, then not at all. It's a relatively small expenditure AT FIRST to get your foot in the door. Once habits have been formed, THEN you drop the membership and buy the equipment yourself.

But that's a totally different thing lol.

That's what you get for all your "free" games on gamepass.

Huh? This is not talking about game pass.

I know that. But they are passing off the cost onto the folks who don’t have it and/or pushing them to just straight up get game pass.

They are "New Coking" us. I don't know how...but the fix is in. This is all very odd.

I have to believe that it's equally likely that what they learned here was not "don't raise the price" but "raise the price in a slower, less obviously outrageous way". Making F2P games not require an XBL subscription is just matching Playstation policy, but also would be a key step is eliminating a separate BBL Gold tier and just rolling it into Game Pass. Xbox charging more/at all for online play was the norm until the previous generation when Sony matched their pricing. Part of me thinks it would seem normal that they would want to go back to that, but part of me also says a lot has changed since the 360. Windows gaming is far more popular and democratized, but it's still complicated, fiddely, and expensive up front compared to console gaming. It's hard for me to know how they see Xbox stacking up against it as an option.

One thing is for sure, this was not the single bad call people are sometimes describing it as. They removed the long-term XBL subscription options for non-renewals months ago before the Series S|X launched, and there are photos of B&M retailers getting the new double-price XBL gift cards, which goes to show that they can't just change these prices on a whim.