The golden age of PC gaming has ended with Game Pass’s frustrating price hike

My brother is a tech nerd who’s never been into gaming. He likes the idea of reliving his childhood by emulating retro games, but he’s not into buying a console, building a PC, and spending $60 on a single game. When we chatted about PC gaming a few years ago, Game Pass was the solution for him.

At the time, it seemed like the perfect fit. Game Pass Ultimate for PC was the all-in-one subscription every curious gamer needed to get into PC gaming. The Ultimate subscription with cloud gaming meant casuals could play hardware-intensive games on a simple laptop, as long as their internet connection was good enough. They also had a massive library of interesting games to try, so they could skip researching about games to buy or spending on these titles. Every single barrier to entry in PC gaming, aside from buying a joystick, was removed with cloud gaming on Game Pass.

My brother, for example, loved to play Microsoft Flight Simulator on Game Pass, and I remember how impressed he was when he first ran it. He sent me a video of the game running on the laptop he uses for work with near-perfect framerate and amazing graphics, thanks to cloud gaming. I became an advocate of cloud gaming since then. I can’t help but use past tense, because the price hike makes these times seem like they’re gone for good.

The Ultimate subscription still has cloud gaming, and the Game Pass library is much bigger than when I recommended the service to my brother. But at a price point of $30, it feels like it’s not worth it. This price hike especially hurts the casual gamers Game Pass was perfect for.

Super casual gamers play video games differently. They might get excited with a game, play it for a week, then drop gaming for weeks or a few months. They don’t do the Steam backlog-hopping that you and I do, where we stop a game to start another. They can go on a huge break from gaming, not from individual games.

Now put yourself in the shoes of a casual PC gamer. You have a $30 monthly subscription for a service you likely will forget exists or you might use only for one or two hours every week. It’s hard to justify that bill, which is why many are already abandoning Game Pass. In my case, on another subscription front, I rarely subscribe to new movie streaming platforms because I don’t watch movies all the time, so I won’t make their cost worth it for me. I’d rather spend on something else or just save.

Unfortunately, these casual gamers will more than ever steer away from PC gaming. At $30/month, suddenly those freemium mobile games look like the obvious choice, even if they’re designed to exploit rather than entertain. That’s a huge loss for everyone, from developers to hardcore gamers, because more people playing just means more people happily enjoying this activity we all love, and that’s much better when shared.