Xbox Game Pass Reportedly Getting À La Carte Tiers

We have wanted this exact pitch for years: stop paying for a bundle and start paying for what we actually use. According to a new Fortune profile of Xbox CEO Asha Sharma, covered by IGN, Microsoft is weighing a tiered, à la carte version of Game Pass where console-only games, cloud streaming, and multiplayer could each be bought as separate add-ons instead of forced into one monthly fee. People familiar with the strategy told Fortune the plan is real, which is not the same as the plan being finished, or priced, or scheduled.

The same Fortune reporting, also summarized in a video from the channel DreamcastGuy, dug into why Xbox might want this. Game Pass built the subscription business Microsoft wanted, but it reportedly cannibalized sales of its own full-price first-party titles at launch, and former employees said competing internal scorecards for subscription revenue versus store revenue made the problem worse. That is a company admitting, through anonymous former staff, that its flagship perk quietly ate its own flagship releases. Filing that under a feature request feels generous.

Sharma has been in the job about six months and the resume already reads long: a price cut on Game Pass Ultimate, the signing of Hideo Kojima's Physint, two new internal verticals, Halo's development handed to Activision, and reportedly personal replies to support tickets along with a look at the latest Elder Scrolls 6 build. Credit where it is earned, and some of that is earned. Then the curve-grading habit catches itself: a new CEO making fast, visible moves is not the same as a new CEO fixing the thing we actually pay for every month, and right now the à la carte plan is an unpriced idea with no ship date attached to any of those other wins.

The same reporting that carries the Game Pass news also carries the next Xbox hardware, the handheld targeted for holiday 2027 and the Project Helix console for holiday 2028, which DreamcastGuy's video put at an internally projected $1,200 to $1,800 unless Microsoft subsidizes it, a figure this site already covered in Next Xbox Could Cost $1,800 and Land in 2028, Report Says. None of that is confirmed by Microsoft, and neither is the Game Pass restructuring: both come from the same unverified strategy report, corroborated once, not confirmed twice.

We will believe à la carte Game Pass is a win the day Microsoft publishes actual tier prices next to actual feature lists, so we can check whether choosing console games, cloud, and multiplayer separately costs less than Ultimate does now or just repackages the same bill into smaller, sneakier pieces. Show us that math unprompted and the loyalty gets renewed without complaint. Make us build the spreadsheet ourselves first, and the complaint gets filed anyway, same as always.