Asha Sharma and Matt Booty, the new leadership team for Microsoft Gaming. (Microsoft Photo)
Asha Sharma’s first big move as Microsoft’s gaming chief is a trade-off.
The company is cutting the price of its Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription by $7 a month, from $29.99 to $22.99. However, future games in the blockbuster Call of Duty franchise from Microsoft-owned Activision will no longer be available on the service at launch.
The changes, announced Tuesday, come a week after Sharma acknowledged in a leaked memo that Game Pass had become too expensive and promised a better value equation.
Microsoft’s gaming business has been under pressure. In the most recent holiday quarter, gaming revenue fell 9% to $5.96 billion, with Xbox content and services coming in below internal projections.
A 50% price hike for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate last October, to $29.99, was widely seen as a response to the cost of adding new Call of Duty games to the service.
Under the new structure, future Call of Duty titles will arrive on Game Pass about a year after launch, during the following holiday season. Existing titles will remain available.
Microsoft’s PC Game Pass price is also dropping, from $16.49 to $13.99 a month.
Sharma took over as CEO of Microsoft Gaming in February, replacing Phil Spencer, who retired after 38 years at the company. She had been running Microsoft’s CoreAI product organization and previously served as chief operating officer at Instacart and as a vice president at Meta.
She arrived without prior gaming industry leadership experience, but pledged to recommit to core Xbox fans, and prioritize great games above all else. She also promoted longtime studio chief Matt Booty to executive vice president and chief content officer.
The Game Pass pricing change raises the question of whether this is a one-time adjustment or the beginning of a broader restructuring. Sharma’s leaked memo last week hinted at a larger vision, saying Microsoft would develop Game Pass into “a more flexible system.”
