Xbox Game Pass page crashing as subscribers rush to cancel after 50% price hike

1 month ago 8

Xbox has just revealed some incredibly unpopular changes to Game Pass. The highest Ultimate tier is getting a 50 percent price increase, now setting subscribers back $29.99/£22.99 a month. The shock reveal has many players racing to cancel their Game Pass subscriptions before their next payment is due, but they're running into some problems.

As multiple users are sharing online - and as we have experienced ourselves - the page to cancel your Xbox Game Pass subscription keeps crashing. Even if you can get onto the page, I've found that it's running pretty slowly, suggesting that there are a whole lot of subscribers who are leaving Game Pass behind in light of today's news.

Microsoft Site Crashes As Xbox Game Pass Users Cancel Their Subscriptions

Many of those looking to cancel their subscriptions are saying that the site keeps crashing for them, something that we have found too. While we can't say why this has happened for certain, there is a decent chance that this is because the page is receiving a whole lot more activity than usual, which is what you'd expect from a price hike this severe.

Just to put this price increase into perspective, anyone with Game Pass Ultimate will now be paying an eye-watering $360 a year. That is 60 bucks more than the Xbox Series S was at launch. Of course, all of the hardware increased in price earlier this year, so the Series S is now $20 pricer than a year of Game Pass Ultimate.

This is all far from the days when the appeal of Game Pass was its affordability. While gaming costs more across the board now, Xbox is a particularly bad offender, as we recently saw with the ROG Xbox Ally X being priced at $999.99. Frankly, it's left a lot of us in the gaming community confused as to what Xbox's strategy is going forward, as it seems to have only gotten more muddled as this console generation goes on.