Xbox lowered the price of Game Pass today. But the truth behind the facade is different than some will be lead to believe. While Call of Duty comes out of the service for the first year of any new version (by which time it will be value-less as the multiplayer community will have moved on to the next version), as the ostensible reason the price can be lowered, plenty of other useless content remains.
Do you still need:
- Fortnite Crew
- Ubisoft+ Classics (these games are frequently on sale for $4.99)
- Benefits for CoD Warzone (when the cross-rewards earnable, Battle Pass, & store MTX are for the version of CoD that is now not in Game Pass)
They raised the price by $10, then reduced it by $7, and are voicetracking it as a good deal, as a means to obfuscate that they are keeping the extra $3 in their pocket. In order to spin it that they are the good guys.
This is because they were losing too much money by putting CoD in Game Pass. If it was really about GP having become too expensive for Gamers, they would have dropped the price to $20, and left a CoD tier that you could add as a kicker with an extra $5 to $6, and maybe added access to a WoW subscription or something else.
A thing that has not been talked about or given much specificity by the gaming media: as the COO at Instacart, one of Sharma’s major “accomplishments” at Instacart was dynamic pricing that tested to see how much people would be willing to pay for grocery items, and would set the price at the higher price people were willing to pay. Eversight, the AI company whose technology powered this strategy was acquired by Instacart in 2022. Asha Sharma’s tenure as COO was February 2021 to February 2024. Her specific purview included the implementation of this strategy, via her oversight of Instacart Marketplace, the consumer app, logistics, and engineering. Her specific mandate: guiding the company through its IPO and towards profitability. The settlement with the FTC found the following predatory practices:
- Algorithmic “Smart Rounding” and A/B Testing
- Price Disparity (75% of items with 23% price variance)
- Targeted Markups for least price-sensitive items using “dynamically optimized pricing”
- Hidden pricing deltas to specifically raise retailer revenue & profits
- surveillance pricing
Not dynamic discounts, but actually setting higher prices. Costing a family of 4 as much as an additional $1200 per year. Of course, by the time of the investigation and hearings, she has already departed Instacart. But productization time and implementation of these functions, given the amount of time they would have taken to roll out to production and seen real returns at retailers, means the efforts would have had to have started during her tenure and within her purview. She was part of the leadership that pursued the Eversight acquisition to power the strategy, which Instacart had already started before. So a lot of what she talks about in using AI, while not for content-slop, her past history here shows how she believes in using it.
This is an incremental test to see how mcuh people are willing to pay. If the response of people coming back is not enough, more stuff will come out.
Additional case in point: Call of Duty went into the service in 2024 with no Game Pass price increase. When the sign-ups to Game Pass were not enough, and they could tell by summer of 2025 (after their financial year closed out and they’d collected all the data), then they raised GP prices as a result of the tepid response.
Rounding Off Infinity 