Call me crazy, but I'll keep paying it. When it's the middle of the month and I'm bored, being able to try a new game for no extra cost beats taking a punt on something I end up not liking. I can also make use of it on PC, and I don't subscribe to PS Plus, so it's one subscription covering two of my gaming platforms. There's still value in that.
Hello Mr. Crazy.
There will always be some people for whom the new price is still enough value.
Not sure why anyone would want their games collection behind a paywall... a snide tax on the less shrewd.
At this point, going forward its for the same reason people have all their TV behind a paywall now (I don't subscribe to any of Netflix etc except for Disney+ which I get "free" anyway) - FOMO.
However, many subscribers have stacked years of GPU via Reward points. I joined xbox late on in 2020 for Forza catalogue but have managed to make my initial £100 purchase using the "£1 trick" last until end of 2026, which is about £17 per annum or £1.50 per month. For which I've got the entire life cycle of FH5 and FM23 and a number of other games.
However, once that stacked subscription runs out, that will be it for me for GamePass.
The only TV paywall I have left is the BBC, and hope that goes as well soon.
Very soon the only option for gaming and TV will be subscriptions and at that point I will have my owned games library and 1,000s of dvds/blurays to watch/play instead.
Depends a little bit on how much you care about ownership, but for a throwaway title it can make sense. Or if you go on vacation somewhere and want a month of cloud gaming. The sword can cut both ways as they say: they want us to treat products as disposable items? Sure, I'll just pay for the month I play and not the full title then. E.g. I do this with Far Cry and Ubisoft: it's not a title I care to own, but I'm fine paying for a month and finish it within that time frame.
Not sure how smart it is of MSFT to drive out all the people who pay for subs, but hardly ever use the service (or at least not to the amount they pay for it).
You can now get cloud gaming on owned titles (where supported) on all tiers so if you have a big enough owned library you would only need the Core (Essentials) tier on vacation.
This is where they've shot themselves in the foot. The lower tiers are now "better value" encouraging even more people to downgrade. Personally I think MS already worked out that the price hike would lead to many users leaving GPU but decided to deliberately "buff" the other tiers as it is better to keep users in some kind of tier rather than lose them altogether.
One thing further to add, many users are on month to month but many users have stacked subscriptions like me, so MS won't see the full picture in terms of lost subscribers until the end of 2026 or even later, as the stacked subscriptions unwind and don't get replaced.
