The Xbox Game Pass price hikes are so bad, it literally crashed the membership site due to widespread cancellations

• Microsoft announced another price increase for Xbox Game Pass
• The membership page crashed due to mass cancellations
• The Ultimate tier membership will now cost $29.99 / £22.99 / AU$35.95 a month

It's barely been a few weeks since Microsoft announced price raises for its Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S consoles earlier in September, and it finds itself at the centre of controversy yet again – and it seems as though gamers are uniting against this issue.

As highlighted by Notebookcheck, Microsoft's membership page crashed after the announcement of Xbox Game Pass price hikes, as a plethora of users rushed to the site for cancellations.

The Ultimate Xbox Game Pass tier will now cost $29.99 / £22.99 / AU$35.95 per month, which makes an annual subscription $360 (not yet available), close to the price of a Series S console after the recent increase. It places Sony's PlayStation Plus subscription service as the cheaper alternative, but that may not last long.

Without sugarcoating it, Xbox is gradually pushing its consumers further away from its entire ecosystem, including PC gamers (like myself) who have used Game Pass as an inexpensive method to play new titles day one – and it became evidently clear once I went to cancel my subscription, and was met with multiple page errors, indicating mass cancellations (and here's how to cancel Game Pass if you didn't already know).

At this point, it seems like the Microsoft Xbox brand can't catch a break with negative feedback and backlash, but many will argue that it only has itself to blame. Game Pass prices were increased earlier last year, Xbox console prices are skyrocketing, and the new ROG Xbox Ally X costs $999, so it's not a wild suggestion to say that consumer complaints are justified.

Based on the scale of fan backlash, we may see Xbox walk back on the new prices for Game Pass, as we've seen this happen with certain games, such as The Outer Worlds 2, where the $80 price controversy led to an eventual drop down to $70.

This is another case where voting with consumers voting with their wallets may prove to be pivotal in sparking reasonable price changes, and those changes may even arrive sooner than expected.

Analysis: Sony's PlayStation Plus is next, and I can sense it

It's only a matter of time, but I fully expect Sony to follow in the same footsteps as Microsoft Xbox with its PlayStation Plus membership service, just in the same manner that I anticipate an eventual $80 game price standard.

Some of you might suggest that this is far-fetched, but it almost feels as though the likes of Sony PlayStation, Microsoft's Xbox, and Nintendo are all in cahoots when raising prices for gaming hardware or games themselves. That feeling came after Microsoft announced its first-party Xbox games would cost $80, which wasn't too long after Nintendo's announcement.

I sense that Sony is waiting for controversy regarding the game and membership service prices to settle (or at least become normalized) before imposing its own new price standards.

These measures across the three giant companies for console gaming are making PC gaming far more appealing than ever before, especially when you consider that online gaming has always been free of charge, and that should never change.

My only major concern is that once more consumers find their way onto the PC ecosystem, that's when we'll start to see more controversial decisions take place, and I fear that the Xbox Game Pass price hikes are just the start of it for PC gamers.

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