"I’m Canceling My Subscription": Xbox Players Call to "Boycott" Game Pass "Hard" Over 50% Price Increase As Microsoft’s Website Crashes from Mass Cancellations

Are people dumb? How else will microsoft fund their AI features for another additional 2 weeks?

Hah oh man I hope this is indicative of a Great Cancelation Event coming to punish all the capitalists, where we take the relatively minor power we have a individuals and combine it to smash the fuck out of them.

The Kimmel Disney thing showed people that we have the power at the end of the day, I hope these XBox games can hang tough and kick Microsoft right in the dick.

(Also maybe give these conglomerates some second thoughts about buying another company...)

I hope these XBox games can hang tough and kick Microsoft right in the dick.
Are you implying Bill Gates has a dick? I don't think he does. Maybe a soft micropenis.
- So micro soft?
- Well he cheated on his wife with something

My wife and I have been slowly over the last few years finding ways to cancel our subscriptions and just own things. If I want to play a vintage game, I buy a physical copy and boot up an emulator. We also set up navidrome and started collecting discs to rip. My wife backed up her spotify playlists before cancelling and we're trying to find a way to link them to music tracks that we own and make a list of what we're missing.

Not a terribly challenging task, but I looked around online to see if anyone else was doing it. What I found was dozens of projects going the other way. People saying "I'm looking to ditch my MP3s and move to Spotify."

It's certainly less work, but I wonder how all of these people will feel when they're locked in and their monthly costs for these services increases and there's absolutely nothing they can do about it.

Definitely not alone. For the music I've rediscovered record stores. They're great ways to fill in the gaps of your music library while also discovering new music. I buy CDs and take them home now, happy to keep them on my shelf.
- I switched to music streaming (Qobuz) because hi res is too expensive for the amount of music I listen to.
  Movies are Garbage quality in streaming though, buying a Blu Ray is so much better and I don't watch many movies anyways.
Being able to do whatever you want with your physical media is so incredibly freeing. Seems like many born after the 90s don't seem to quite have a grasp on what that's like.
- I have a digital projector that we take camping. It runs androidOS and you can install apps on it. There is no wifi when camping.
  Movies ripped to a thumb drive saves the day.
  In 1996, I watched Back to the Future on VHS on a portable CRT TV.
  Also the ability to pull a clip from any film you own to create the perfect reaction gif is super nice.
I buy a physical copy
🫡
You two sound great (would beer)
- Pirated enough games in my childhood. It's the least I could do.
I canceled spoofy earlier this year and have been slowly building my library proper ever since. honestly I've always preferred direct downloading my music over streaming because I can access it all offline, I only started using Spotify when my sd card corrupted and I lost all my music on it. tbf it was all pirated cause I was a broke kid but now that I'm buying everything I'm making sure to have backups and physical CDs when I can get them so it never has to be a problem again!
and honestly it's been SO FUN looking up artists and albums, listening to songs Ive previously ignored or were part of like a collaboration and realizing I really like them. i even got the guts to email one of my favorite artists to inquire about songs he didn't have on his bandcamp (he sold the rights to em so he can't sell the songs 😔) and now I look forward to the monthly album I buy to bolster my collection.
- My wife loves bandcamp. Especially the sales where they give 100% of the revenue to the artist.
This is the way. The new quiet revolution where we dont buy the bullshit anymore.
Back in 2015 or so, I noticed some of the movies on Netflix that I wanted to rewatch disappeared. I caught on pretty early that this was going to be the case where all the good stuff cycles out, so I took to building a Blu-Ray collection. Now all of my favorites are quick and easy to get to.
At some point I’m planning on digitizing the whole collection because I know discs degrade, but I’ve been hesitant because I don’t want to cook my drive’s laser in the process.
- I take a hybrid approach. I'll buy a movie from my local shop and then go sailing the seas for a digital copy. Much...grayer... but close enough.
- You can get bluray drives used for like $30. The real issue is the 4k drives because only certain older models let you rip those. They're harder to replace.
- You can always get a stack of usb dvd drives, and use those.
How are you liking navidrome? I’ve been using Jellyfin for everything, using the finamp app for music, and it’s been pretty good. I’ve heard good things about navidrome but I already had Jellyfin set up on my server so I just stuck with it for music too. I don’t have much music on there yet though so I’d consider moving over to navidrome if it was a considerable improvement. I did try to get it set up a few weeks back but couldn’t get it right away and got busy afterwards.
- My wife is the music person, so I set it up for her. She seems to like it. I had funkwhale originally, but it doesn't have nearly the features (though it does support multiple users' libraries).
  The plan is to generate playlists in navidrome and match the filesystems so she can just drag them to her iPod. I haven't looked into it all too much, but one annoying thing is that some things are kept in the database that I wish were plaintext. Like, I think you can rename files and whatever in the web interface, but it doesn't modify the original files. I guess that's okay if you're nervous about busting your files, but I wish you had a little more control over it.
I agree with everything you're saying, however it's a bit much to claim anyone would ever be "locked in" can always just cancel the subscription lol
- Go ahead and try to buy a copy of Klaus on DVD.
Well, mp3s are crap. I’m sure if they had built a collection around flacs, they wouldn’t feel this way.

I was planning to cancel it a while ago but this actually made me do it.

Why?

because of life obligations I consider myself lucky if I can play something once per week.
with the money that I spend on the subscription I can buy a (more) older game(s) and keep myself entertained for half a year.
having the latest releases is nice, but I can wait one year and buy it on some sale and if not... mneh... Whatever...
sure you get hundreds of games with Game Pass, but most of them are either noise or not my type of genre.
fuck Microsoft.

Yeah, I'm in a similar situation. Don't get a lot of game time and I've got a pretty large backlog of stuff I want to play. If I like the look of something I wishlist it and buy it on sale for less than £10.
I think the gamepass model is going to be struggling with economic factors - many of us are working more and have less playtime, and money is tighter.

Right. Microsoft’s website is struggling. The same Microsoft whose core business model is selling server/cloud infrastructure? Yeah, I definitely believe that.

Counterpoint:
Do you remember Xbox Live?
- The thing I hate the most about XBox live is it convinced Sony that they should make the PlayStation network paid for as well.
  Sure I know someone has to host all the shit, but man it sure would be nice to play games without having to pay for other services after paying for the game.
  The number of games you can play offline seemed to plumit after Microsoft/Sony made paid for network access.
They most likely, and purposefully, relegate few assets to a cancellation page.
- Yeah, that’s what was subtly hinting at.
This post tells me you're not required to use Power Automate for work. It must be nice.
If you don't believe Microsoft can fail at the things they're supposed to be best at...lol ...you 12?
- Right, they’re supposed to be best at letting you cancel their services. They could handle the traffic, I’m just sure they choose not to.

This is the endgame of all subscriptions. I have not one. Purchase where they will let you purchase without DRM, for the rest: 🏴‍☠️

Unfortunately piracy doesn't help the people who need it here. Hard to pirate on an Xbox, and Xbox players aren't generally the type to just ditch the ecosystem where all of their game progress and friends are just to jump to a platform they have no experience or history with
- Switch to gaming on Windows? Windows sucks compared to Linux, but for people who don’t wanna leave the ecosystem, Windows should be quite compatible with most Xbox games and multiplayer. Also it’s absurdly easy to pirate games on using a .site like fitgirl-repacks

It was always going to end like this. If you're surprised, I hope you learned a valuable lesson.

Yeah. I lay for YouTube Premium. And it has already gone up. If it goes up any further though I may have to cancel. The whole family uses it though so cancelling it will affect more than just me. They aren’t tech savvy enough to avoid ads.
Now if YouTube blocks sharing a family account across houses (in my country) then they will make the decision really simple.

Even if 1/3 of their subscribers cancel they still come out ahead because of lower infrastructure costs. i doubt they are going to see a 1/3 reduction in subscribers, so capitalist exploitation and enshittification will win again.

It's still better for people overall if the parasites take larger sums from fewer willing idiots compared to them taking less each from more people, even if their bottom line is unaffected.

Jesus Fucking Christ, it was $4.99/month a few years ago; what did Microsoft expect? Even at that price it was hardly worth paying for...

I haven't paid a subscription for entertainment for a handful of years now, but now I'm starting to understand why people are canceling streaming services en masse. Disney+ was $6.99/mo back when I had it but I heard it's also $20-something a month now too. People just needed a good excuse to cancel, and now they have one.

Theoretically, now that Microsoft owns half the AAA studios, you could expect Gamepass to have a lot of day 1 AAA games.
Unfortunately, they just bought all the studios and... ordered them to stop making games or something.
I'd cancel if I hadn't done it several years ago. Oh well.
At 5 euros a month it was a steal. It was an amazing value in the moment and games deflate quickly. Economic realities ended it. But that doesn't mean it was shit.
When was game pass ever $5? I always remember it being 10.

There's been a glitch on my Xbox where I haven't paid for one pass in 10 years but still have access to all the game. I never intentionally subverted the rules but it somehow happened

Maybe I'm too old, but I never understood the appeal of game passes, you can't play hundreds of games at the same time unless you have nothing else to do in your life, and most of them are garbage anyway.

Only reasonable subscription model to me is MMOs, because those require a complex infrastructure to run, but non-MMO games? No thank you, I'll just turn to indies that still sell games without any live-service bullshit.

When a new game costs 60 bucks, just paying for a game pass and have access to a random library seems appealing. It's also a nice way to try and discover games I guess. I never used it.
Cloud play allows local couch co-op without a second console/version of the game.
- Back in my day we had split screen multiplayer
Back when it was under the price of 2 games a year it was a pretty good deal. Thinking of buying the next Halo and Forza? Get gamepass and save money, and have the opportunity to try a bunch of other stuff you wouldn't have played.
There's amazing games like Hades and Slay the Spire that I wouldn't have been interested enough in to purchase that are now among my favorites because Gamepass let me try them.
Honestly, I think the better route would be to keep it cheap but not include new releases. Let people access the back catalog affordably with games that aren't brining in much new revenue anyway. People will discover games and genres they otherwise would not have played, which will create new markets and boost ssales of new releases.
Here in Brazil (and problably most of the developing world as well), piracy used to be the standard way to get console games. People would buy unblocked consoles from street merchants and then buy pirated media from them, or download the games from pirate sites.
But with the newer xbox xs series, they made it so that piracy is impossible, and people got forced to buy games from microsoft. Since most people around here don't have much money to spend, game pass became an option to have a selection of games always at disposal for a reasonable price, so it became popular. Sadly, that's how microsoft expanded their business to the developing countries.
It can probably make sense if you play a lot. You can try out a lot of different games without buyers remorse. I know steam has a good return policy but sometimes you just miss the return window.
Personally, I just wait a few years and buy everything in the steam sale for under 30% of original price.
- Steam does demo fests with tons of new games to try completely free, that's my goto when I want to try something new, true that not all games offer a demo but that's devs loss imo, if they believe in their games they shouldn't be afraid of releasing a demo.
  I too usually wait for discounts (got Mass Effect legendary edition at 10$ xD), especially on GOG, only exception are games like BG3 or Expedition 33, for those I'm happy to pay full price the moment they release.
They make sense if you play through enough titles. If you have a pass and only ever play one game, that's probably a bad idea.

This was just the reminder I needed to cancel as I moved over to Linux and they don't support Linux or have an app. Didn't realize that it was going to go up again.

Oh yea, I knew I forgot to cancel something after switching my gaming pc to Linux.

I was thinking about giving it a try for a while, the PC version, anyway. Won't be doing that now.

Literally had the convo with someone to get it Saturday, glad I didn't jump on it

Just cancelled my subscription and 365 subscription. $360 back in my pocket every year.

The inevitable, it was always going to rise, it was loss-leader to get market share.

I tried telling so many people that and their answer was always either so what, or no it wont. Well, here we are. If you own a thing the price doesn't go up
- This is written like it was stupid of people to jump on game pass when it was cheap. I knew it would go the way of pretty much ever single online subscription eventually. Enshittification is inevitable. But it was absolutely a killer deal for a while there.

I used to think Game Pass was a good idea but more and more I rather owning my games.

(yeah, yeah, I know, you're only buying a license)

Unless its from GOG of course, because then you really do own your game
- Even there you only get a license. You don't get to resell the copies. Or claim ownership.
- Unless you have limitless storage, you still can’t access the title when their servers go offline. So no you STILL don’t actually own it.
  This is the worst perpetuation of the GOG program that keeps getting tossed around.
GOG. It’s not all games, but you can own some of them. Steam, in spite of the CEO that keeps it decent, started this lease under the guise of buying model.
That said, subs are much worse. If the Disney/Kimmel situation taught us anything, it’s that boycotts work.
Subs are costing most Americans, on average, $300/mo. (More Perfect Union covered it.). That’s a monthly grocery bill for 1-2, if you buy right and cook. Subs are part of the “squeeze” that siphons money to the top 1%.
- If the Disney/Kimmel situation taught us anything, it’s that boycotts work.
  Counterpoint: Colbert
- Loads of steam games can be played in offline mode and stored in drives. That always been a feature and has never changed.
  They just don’t need to promote it, who needs it knows about it, but people love circle jerking that GOG lets you own your titles. Both do, and both aren’t available to download when their servers are gone, so they are functionally identical. If Steam promoted it, it would probably be caught on and called out that it’s not actual “owning”. It’s weird seeing GOG being referred to differently, and people eat it up. It’s marketing, that’s all.
i use gamepass as like a preview, if i really like a game ill just buy it (like south of midnight)
- Paying $20 a month for demos and buying hopefully not only that single game is a horrendous idea.

I was considering canceling anyway since I found myself using it less and less, so this was a good deciding factor.

how about not having to pay for playing online on the console? i know this is about ultimate but i am still pissed that i have to pay everytime i want to play something else online then fortnite

Paying extra just to have access to multiplayer is one of the core reasons I sold my 360 and haven't bought a console since. PS2 and latest PC are both golden!

WHAT? I didn’t fucking know that. Shouldn’t they notify you of shit like that? Me and my wife are both cancelling ours for sure.

Today I purchased 4 games on Steam sale in one go: Elite Dangerous: Deluxe Edition, DOOM Eternal Standard Edition, Hades and Slay the Spire for 18,34€. I don't need to repay to play them and "own them forever"*****(big asterisk, i know!).

The part of Game Pass that gets me the wrong way the most is, if I stop paying monthly, then I loose access to all games I played so far too. Yes, that's the point of a subscription and I dislike it. To be honest, the price of Game Pass was really good in the past. But I usually focus at max a few games in a month anyway, including free to play, so having such a big library to choose from is not that big of a deal.

Some games on steam are actually DRM free and you do 'own' them once downloaded. I think slay the spire is one but I could be remembering wrong.
- Right, there are lists for: https://steam.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_DRM-free_games and https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_big_list_of_DRM-free_games_on_Steam
  I can find Slay the Spire in the second list.
Eternal was fun, I only got to it a few months ago. Great deals! Slay the Spire is a favorite

gamer_boycott.jpg

Doorman was a cheater that made his own game hacks, not a god!
Context: =DiG= (Doorman is God) was the FPS clan where that boycott started. I was a member of that clan for some time (before it came out about Doorman's cheating and no longer playing the games they were a clan over), and one of the mods of that boycott group that failed so hard due to consumer apathy.
AMA.

Lol I guess they need to route some power from six mile island to keep up

I stopped subscribing when they first went up from $1/month.

Yeah, they used to constantly offer $1/month, I'd take that for a month and try a game I was interested in. I got value there, but I'd never pay more than that and certainly not on a recurring basis.
For about a year I could cancel my 1€ subscription and renew it every other month 6€ for half a year was worth it. But the app lacks so much no way I'm paying more
- That's basically what I mean. I gamed the system until they closed the loophole. I found ONE game through it I would not have normally known or played. And that was Void Bastards.

Subscriptions are a scam and always have been. This was expected. I wouldn’t be surprised if they raise it again within 2026.

Never had or wanted gamepass

Why do people even play on consoles? Just build a PC and be done with this shit.

Building a PC that can compete with a console costs like 4x as much as a console. A modern graphics card alone costs more than a console
Every time I ask someone to show me the mythical build that performs as well as a console does while costing less, they either disengage because they realize it's impossible, or they come back with a $600 build that performs just about as well as an Xbox One
- 3070 ti can be bought used and does the trick. Also you can find a PC on marketplace for a few hundred. And upgrade the GPU. You’ll get a PC going for just about what a console costs now.