Xbox Game Pass reportedly getting à la carte plans
Pick-your-own pricing could cut costs or just fragment the current tiers into more expensive pieces
Microsoft is planning a major overhaul of Xbox Game Pass that will let subscribers build their own plans à la carte style, according to a Fortune profile on Xbox CEO Asha Sharma. Instead of the current tier system (Core, Standard, Ultimate), you'd pick the features you actually want — cloud streaming, day-one releases, EA Play — and pay for those.
The report doesn't specify pricing or a launch window, but it suggests Microsoft is trying to stop the subscriber bleed that's hit Game Pass over the past year. The current tiers confuse people: Standard doesn't include day-one games, Ultimate costs $20/month, and Core is basically just online multiplayer with a handful of older games. An à la carte model could let you pay $10 for day-one access without cloud streaming, or $5 for cloud without the back catalog — in theory.
This could be good if you only care about one or two features and don't want to pay for the full Ultimate bundle. It could also be worse if Microsoft prices each feature high enough that bundling them back together costs more than Ultimate does now. We'll see.
If you're optimizing settings for any Game Pass title, run a fresh playbook on BetterFPS to make sure your rig is actually hitting the frame targets before you renew.