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After the Xbox Game Pass price hike, is it time to cancel and start buying games again?
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After the Xbox Game Pass price hike, is it time to cancel and start buying games again?

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Hello and welcome to another entry in our “The Big Question” series, in which we present an argument to you, the Eurogamer community, for further interrogation. This week: After the Xbox Game Pass price hike, is it time to cancel and start buying games again?

What’s all this about? Well, if you didn’t see the news from earlier in the week, Xbox has increased the price of its Game Pass offerings. The top-tier, Game Pass Ultimate now costs a not-insignificant £22.99 a month or about £276 a year! I’ve already commented on how an eventual Game Pass demise might be bad for game discovery, for those who use the service that way, and today we’re asking if it’s time to wave bye bye to Game Pass and start buying games again. Of course, there might also be a middle ground, if anyone is able to see nuance in a topic (unlikely, this is the internet!).

Today, I’m confused as I struggle to weigh up the true value proposition of Game Pass.

No one can tell you what value is, but there’s no denying Game Pass Ultimate is now more expensive than the competition

£23 is a lot of money. Of course, this is somewhat relative, and you might argue that if you are someone with a £500 a month car lease, a £60 phone contract, and £40 a month sub to an artisanal cake delivery company, that actually it’s not much, really – but it is. In the world of entertainment subscriptions it’s a lot.

Netflix Premium, the most expensive tier offered by any streaming TV/Film streaming service, is £18.99 a month. Game Pass Ultimate is more expensive. PlayStation Plus Premium, the high-end option for PlayStation users, is £13.49 a month or £120 a year, which is a lot cheaper than Game Pass Ultimate. So, then you must look at the value, which is almost impossible to say anything definitive on as everyone is different – where I might see a smart addition to the service, others will see a way to charge more for something they don’t want.

For me, I do use the EA Play games as they get added to the catalogue, and I was subscribed to this separately before it was added to Game Pass Ultimate. I also will absolutely get my money’s worth from the Fortnite Crew perk that my son has been desperate for since Epic introduced it. Do I also want Day One Xbox published games? Yes, I do, and it’s probably my number one reason for preferring Game Pass to rival services. Better streaming quality for games playing via the Cloud? Maybe – the jury is still out on how good streaming has become.

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Is this enough to pay more than double the £11 for Game Pass Premium or eat the cost of a Burger King meal deal on top of the £13.49 for Sony’s best offering? Incidentally, GP Premium currently lists 373 games, PS Plus Premium (including classic games) is at about 550, and GP Ultimate offers 838. Quality counts for more, here, I’d argue, but there’s certainly some more value on display.

That’s a whole lot of talk without actually making any statements about my future with Game Pass. The recurring billing elephant in the room, and let’s lower our voices a little, is the fact that you don’t have to pay £22.99 a month for Game Pass Ultimate. Just yesterday I added a year to my membership for £135 via a proper UK games retailer that is widely used. No doubt this will increase somewhat in the near future, but I very much doubt I’ll ever pay the full price.

Do I think I’ll cancel Game Pass, then, and switch to buying games? It might shock you to hear it, but I already buy plenty of games. Not many Xbox games, but 10+ a year across Switch, PS5, and PC. I don’t think I’m going to cancel Game Pass and start buying Xbox games again as the service gives me and my family comparatively cheap access to a wide variety of games. It’s also just easy. The games in Game Pass are the games we have on Xbox – play all that take our fancy, and don’t worry about all the rest. I’ve always been quite tight (careful, is perhaps a better term) with money, and I’m not averse to making spreadsheets or performing some scrap paper maths, and £20 I can just file away – that’s my spending on Xbox, done, nice and neat.

-Tom O

The big question, then: After the Xbox Game Pass price hike, is it time to cancel and start buying games again?



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Payday devs Starbreeze cancel their mystery Dungeons & Dragons game and announce plans to lay off around 44 staff
Game Updates

Payday devs Starbreeze cancel their mystery Dungeons & Dragons game and announce plans to lay off around 44 staff

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Starbreeze have cancelled Project Baxter, the co-op live service Dungeons & Dragons game they announced back in 2023. Part of the development team have been transferred to other projects with Starbreeze, while the remainder get to “transition to new roles across the industry”.

Starbreeze have told us little about Project Baxter over the years, beyond characterising it as an action-adventure that reflects their “lifetime commitment” to Games-as-a-Service, and stating that it would support PC and console crossplay. They announced it with a couple of artworks – one depicting a close-cropped mage in a cape, the other some pointy roofs and pennants. The game surely would have built upon Starbreeze’s established, albeit recently eroded reputation for co-op heisting. Now, however, Starbreeze bosses have decided that doubling down on Payday is the safer route forward.

“This was a difficult but necessary decision,” comments CEO Adolf Kristjansson in a release to investors. “Our strategy is clear: Payday is one of the most iconic IPs in gaming, with unmatched reach and potential. By focusing our investment and talent here, we can accelerate delivery, engage players with more content, and reinforce Starbreeze’s position as the clear leader in the heisting genre. This is about sharpening our focus to create the strongest long-term value for our players, our people, and our shareholders.”

Around 44 people, spanning employees and contractors, are to lose their roles at Starbreeze in the course of writing off Baxter. The press release adds that “the discontinuation of Baxter, combined with an increased focus on the Payday franchise, will enable Starbreeze to become cash-flow positive in 2026.” For context, cash-flow positive means you have more money coming in over a given period, than going out – it’s not the same as being overall profitable. Starbreeze made a huge loss in their financial year 2024 after a catastrophic launch showing for Payday 3.

Kristjansson ends the release by thanking the Baxter team and D&D license owners Wizards of the Coast, adding that work on Baxter “will carry forward into Payday and the future of Starbreeze”. Maybe they should give the laid-off Baxter team members a Special Thanks credit in Payday 4, assuming that’s next on the agenda. Best of luck to everybody affected.



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WIRED Roundup: The Right Embraces Cancel Culture
Gaming Gear

WIRED Roundup: The Right Embraces Cancel Culture

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Zoë Schiffer: Right.

Manisha Krishnan: … which some human design followers believe that your spleen is a better guide than your gut. And so he ended up breaking it off with one of the women that he was dating in Love Is Blind because he said, “His spleen was silent.”

Zoë Schiffer: I was locked in for the first part of this. And then we got to the spleen thing. What does that mean? Is it literally a gut sense? What are they tapping into?

Manisha Krishnan: Honestly, it is really confusing because they have all of these rules around deconditioning yourself from essentially forces within you that don’t jive with who you really are, but the way that you decondition yourself seems to be in some cases very rigid. I saw one person on Reddit posting about how they only eat polenta because that’s the only ingredient that will allow them to become their truest self according to human design.

Zoë Schiffer: I do want to know, do you know what I am?

Manisha Krishnan: Yes.

Zoë Schiffer: Because you asked me my birthday yesterday, so I’m on the edge of my seat.

Manisha Krishnan: I did. I plugged it in. And you are a generator, which is an energy type defined with a sacral center characterized by a consistent self-sustaining life force—

Zoë Schiffer: Wow.

Manisha Krishnan: … that provides stamina and the capacity to do fulfilling work.

Zoë Schiffer: Did WIRED write this?

Manisha Krishnan: I know, I was just thinking that.

Zoë Schiffer: Well, great. I love that for myself. Coming up after the break, we’ll dive into the backlash that some people from graphic designers to high-profile entertainers have received after commenting on Charlie Kirk’s death.

[break]

Zoë Schiffer: Welcome back to Uncanny Valley. I’m Zoë Schiffer. I’m joined today by senior culture editor Manisha Krishnan. Manisha, the story that keeps on reverberating this week is that of Charlie Kirk’s death. Our colleague, Jake Lahut, has been covering how the Trump administration in the general right-wing base has maintained their position that Kirk’s death was a result of leftist ideology and maybe even a coordinated attack. Both of these claims have been debunked, but it’s done little to change people’s minds. And this week, you reported that different artists have been facing professional retaliation for voicing their opinions on Kirk. What did you find in your reporting?

Manisha Krishnan: There’s been a bunch of people from different industries that have lost their jobs over posting unsympathetically about Charlie Kirk’s death, from journalists to video game developers. But one that stuck out in my mind was I interviewed this trans writer who was doing a comic series for DC Comics. She referred to Charlie Kirk as a Nazi bitch after he died, and she was suspended on Bluesky for a week, and DC fired her and they’ve canceled the series. And that really stuck out to me because she has said that Charlie Kirk, he was staunchly anti-trans. I mean, he was anti a lot of things that weren’t a straight Christian white male, and he was pretty loud and proud about those views. And so I think it really does stick out to me because it’s almost like, are people expected to perform grief for someone who espoused hateful views towards the community that they’re part of, but it almost feels like this really, really hard line that a lot of corporations have taken. Making someone apologize is one thing, but literally disappearing art, canceling an entire series or South Park deciding not to re-air an episode about Charlie Kirk that he himself loved. He said he really liked it. I just think it goes a little bit beyond just reprimanding people.



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Cancel Culture Comes for Artists Who Posted About Charlie Kirk’s Death
Gaming Gear

Cancel Culture Comes for Artists Who Posted About Charlie Kirk’s Death

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Media pundits, journalists, and academics, including MSNBC commentator Matthew Dowd, have also been fired or targeted over their comments about Kirk. Executives from Comcast, which owns NBC Universal, sent out an email to employees seemingly referencing Dowd’s dismissal over an “unacceptable and insensitive comment about this horrific event. That coverage was at odds with fostering civil dialogue.” In response to a request for comment, Comcast redirected WIRED to the aforementioned letter.

Red Hood is also not the only cultural product being disappeared in light of Kirk’s death. Comedy Central has decided not to rerun the South Park episode “Got a Nut,” which satirized the right-wing activist. But Kirk himself had said the episode was “hilarious” and an example of the “cultural domination” of his Prove Me Wrong college campus debates; he even changed his show’s TikTok profile picture to an image of the South Park character Cartman parodying him. (The episode will still be available to stream on Paramount+.)

Kirk was one of the most influential conservative activists in the US. He cofounded Turning Point when he was just 18 and turned it into a multimillion-dollar enterprise. But his political views were frequently inflammatory, racist, and transphobic, and he had many critics, including people like Felker-Martin, who belonged to one of the groups he derided. In his final exchange before he was shot, Kirk was asked about transgender mass shooters. He responded that there were “too many,” repeating a myth that has been used to attack trans people.

Author Roxane Gay, who has spoken out in Felker-Martin’s defense, says that whether she agrees with Felker-Martin’s views “doesn’t matter.”

“Either you believe in free speech or you don’t,” she tells WIRED, describing DC Comics’ decision to pull Red Hood as the “overreaction of the century.”

From Trump’s plan to wipe “race-centered ideology” and trans people from the Smithsonian to the cancellation of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, the campaign against Kirk’s critics and its impact on pop culture isn’t happening in a vacuum. Humor and satire are particularly triggering for authoritarian figures, according to curator and culture critic Hrag Vartanian, editor in chief of the arts publication Hyperallergic.

“Authoritarians can deal with violence. They can deal with everything except being laughed at,” Vartanian says.

Vartanian tells WIRED he has spoken with many artists who have delayed showing works about topics like the war in Gaza or queerness due to the current political environment, in a form of self-censorship.

Gay says because she has a family, she too has to take fewer risks. But she says she is still “shocked” that more writers aren’t openly backing Felker-Martin. “If it’s her today, it’s going to be someone else tomorrow,” she says.

For her part, Felker-Martin, who has also been outspoken in her support of Palestine, says that once she’s back on Bluesky, she’ll likely keep a lower profile.

Asked if there’s anything that’s making her feel positive right now, she recalls a recent baby shower for a queer family member.

“We had this huge crowd of trans and queer people, into which we dropped my very kind and normal parents. And it was just this really pleasant day with all of our lives kind of mixed together and kids running around,” she says. “I think that living in that is the best thing we can do for ourselves right now. Having and making community by being with each other.”



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FTC Sues Gym Chains for Making It Hard to Cancel Memberships
Gaming Gear

FTC Sues Gym Chains for Making It Hard to Cancel Memberships

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The Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit against the operators of several gym chains, including LA Fitness, on Wednesday over allegations that they make it too difficult to cancel memberships. And that’s probably welcome news for anyone who’s had the displeasure of trying to cancel with their gym.

The companies being sued by the FTC are Fitness International and Fitness & Sports Clubs, which own gym chains like Esporta Fitness, City Sports Club, and Club Studio. The largest chain, LA Fitness, has over 600 locations across the U.S.

The 22-page complaint, which has been posted online, details how the FTC believes LA Fitness and others have created a cumbersome process for consumers to cancel. For starters, members are required to log in to their website and print off a cancellation form. But users are encouraged at sign-up to use the LA Fitness app and a QR code, meaning that many people apparently don’t know their login information for the website. There’s no way to cancel through the app, according to the FTC.

Customers who don’t know how to log in with their credentials need to jump through even more hoops to get them. The user must provide the original email address used to get the membership account, the “key tag number” handed out when they signed up, and the first five digits of the bank account or credit card number listed on the account, according to the complaint.

The cancellation form isn’t made publicly available on the company’s website and can only be found after users log in. And the form must be printed out, a very real hurdle for many households in the year 2025.

Even if you figure out how to log in with your credentials and print out the form, customers are required to either mail the form or bring the form to a physical location, where they’ll face even more hurdles. The FTC says customers are required to send cancellation forms via registered or certified mail. And even though most LA Fitness locations are open seven days a week, often for 19 hours a day, cancellations are only accepted between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., when most people are at work.

Nobody really wants to take PTO to cancel their gym membership. And that’s how people can get stuck with gym memberships they no longer want.

The FTC’s press release announcing the lawsuit also alleges that LA Fitness has trained staff to reject requests to cancel by phone or email. And “consumers who try to cancel their memberships by stopping charges to their bank or credit card find they are rebilled, often under new account numbers.” The FTC says that violates the FTC Act and the Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act (ROSCA). Cancelling with nothing more than a click on the app seems like it would be a reasonable and consumer-friendly way to conduct business.

“The FTC’s complaint describes a scenario that too many Americans have experienced—a gym membership that seems impossible to cancel,” Christopher Mufarrige, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in a press release.

“Tens of thousands of LA Fitness customers reported difficulties—cancellation was often restricted to specific times or required speaking to specific managers who were often not present or available. The FTC will not hesitate to act on behalf of consumers when it believes companies are stifling consumers’ ability to choose which recurring charges they want to keep.”

LA Fitness is far from the only business that seems to thrive on cumbersome auto-renewal policies. How many times have you signed up for a digital subscription of some kind and failed to cancel before you were charged again? It seems like an increasingly popular business model these days. And the FTC has taken notice.

Fitness International, the operator of LA Fitness, didn’t immediately respond to questions emailed on Wednesday. Gizmodo will update this post when we hear back.



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