Xbox Game Pass Lost Millions of Subscribers After 2025 Price Hike

Xbox Game Pass lost millions of subscribers, as confirmed by Xbox’s new chief strategy officer, Matthew Ball. Speaking at The Game Business Live on June 9, Matthew Ball acknowledged the scale of the fallout from the October 2025 price increase that raised Game Pass costs by 50%. The price hike sent cancellation searches spiking immediately after the announcement and triggered one of the more visible subscriber exits the service had seen since launch.

Ball did not give a specific number, but millions is not a vague qualifier when the service's last confirmed subscriber count sat between 35 and 38 million. Even at the low end of what "millions" implies, it represents a meaningful percentage of the total base walking away in direct response to a pricing decision.

Can Xbox Recover From its Mistakes?

Earlier this year, Xbox reduced Game Pass pricing and quietly removed Call of Duty from its higher-tier bundles. The reduction and the Call of Duty removal were corrections made because the October 2025 hike had demonstrably damaged the service's health.

The 50% increase was always a significant ask. Game Pass had built its reputation on being the best value proposition in console gaming; the service that let players access a library of major releases for a monthly fee that felt almost too reasonable to sustain. When that fee jumped by half in one announcement, it crossed a psychological threshold that incremental increases over time would never have reached. 

The question now is whether Xbox has done enough to reverse the damage. The brand is moving back to exclusives to make owning an Xbox or subscribing to Game Pass worth it. It is a departure from the previous Xbox strategy of its consoles simply being one of the many ways to play multiplatform games. Day-one access to genuine exclusives is the original promise of the service, and Xbox had largely abandoned that promise by shipping most of its games to PlayStation.