Xbox Game Pass has gone through many phases since its launch in 2017. At first, it seemed like a harebrained scheme that would never work. In the early Series X era, it was widely hailed as “the best deal in games.” But after Microsoft bought Activision — and the gravy-train Call of Duty franchise along with it — Xbox found itself in a position to recoup a $70 billion investment. By the time 2025 drew to a close, a subscription service that had once cost $10 or $15 per month was now a whopping $30 per month, or $360 per year.
Microsoft’s April 21 move to cut the price of Game Pass Ultimate from $30 to $23 per month is a welcome step in the right direction for everyone but Call of Duty superfans. But there’s a battle-tested way to bring newbies and lapsed subscribers back to Team Green — bring back the $1 trial subscription. For real this time.
To be clear, Xbox does currently offer discounted trials for its Game Pass Essential and Premium tiers, but they’re nowhere near as enticing as the version we all remember from the service’s early days. With the current Essential tier, you can get your first month for just a buck, but there’s only 50 games available. The Premium $1 offer gets you 200+ games, but only for 14 days. The Ultimate tier, the full-fat version of the service, doesn’t have any kind of discounted trial.
A month-long trial of the worst version of Game Pass isn’t going to make people want to spend more money — it’s just a constant reminder of how much better the other tiers are. It’s bringing the much-loathed Spirit Airlines experience to console gaming. A plane trip is over in a couple of hours; you can tough it out. But why would you keep spending money on a subscription that constantly reminds you how limited it is, month after month?
On the other hand, we’ve already seen from the early days of Series X that a month-long, discounted trial of Game Pass Ultimate will get players in the door. (It also created very strong word-of-mouth, which Xbox could definitely use right now.) So why not let new or lapsed players spend a month enjoying the 500+ games in the Ultimate-tier library, instead of cutting them off after just two weeks, or making them feel tricked into forgetting to cancel after a short trial? I’m much more likely to continue a subscription if I’m working my way through a game I enjoy, rather than being badgered at every turn to spend more money.
The early 2020s heyday of Game Pass is what got me to buy a Microsoft console for the first time. Until that point, I’d always preferred Nintendo and Sony, since Xbox’s offering tended to skew more toward sports and shooters. The library of retro, indie, and mid-budget games was the appeal — I couldn’t care less about day-one Call of Duty or a “free” Fortnite Crew membership. I’m not sure that we can go back to a time when Game Pass was a cool platform to discover weird little games, and not a symptom of a pernicious illness that threatens to devour an entire industry. But it sure would be nice to try. For exactly $1.
