Microsoft canceled its planned price increase for Xbox Live Gold. While this may appear to be a typical business decision, in this particular case it wasn’t. The reason - Microsoft likely screwed up with an announcement made a few hours earlier.
Xbox Live Gold is a premium subscription offering several features of which the most important is online gaming through the console. This subscription is also necessary for those who want to stream their own games. The service is priced at $9.99 for one month, $24.99 for three months, $39.99 for six months, and $59.99 for 12 months.
So what happened? Microsoft said in a post that it continues to “assess the value and pricing” of its services. As such, the company announced that they were making certain price adjustments for the Gold service in selected markets. How big is the change? In that same post, Microsoft said that the new pricing will be one month for $10.99, three months for $29.99, and six months for $59.99. Notice how they phrased that?
They stopped at the 6-month price but if you look at the values, the implication is that the price for an annual subscription pretty much doubled. Obviously, that didn’t sit well with Xbox console owners, who expectedly got angry at the announcement. You can view one of the discussions in the video below:
As anticipated, Microsoft caved after that. Microsoft has since updated that post admitting that they “messed up today.” Not only did they cancel the planned price increase but even introduced a new feature.
Microsoft revealed that free-to-play games no longer required a Gold subscription. Once this feature is live, Xbox owners can now play multiplayer for free-to-play games.
"For free-to-play games, you will no longer need an Xbox Live Gold membership to play those games on Xbox. We are working hard to deliver this change as soon as possible in the coming months," Microsoft stated.
This is actually a bit late since Xbox remained the only platform that didn’t have a free multiplayer feature for free-to-play games.
Overall, it wasn’t a surprise that Microsoft’s plan was met with a negative backlash. After all, we are still under a pandemic, and the added cost certainly makes it more difficult. Then, there’s also the rather vague reason for the increase.
So, what do you think? Should Xbox really increase the price for the Gold service?
