Infinite growth is impossible, so they switched to squeezing something until it breaks, then identifying the next thing to squeeze. Eventually, they run out of things to squeeze, and switch to squeezing the people directly.

Is it fair to blame 343 Studios' incredibly, laughably incompetent handling of the Halo franchise for this? And by this I mean the obvious death of the Xbox as a gaming platform. Or, from a different perspective, could Halo have actually saved the Xbox if the games had been amazing, or even just good?

While they might or might not have reasons to raise prices, those people who cancelled their subscriptions definitively had their reason.

Xbox: "Price Increases Are Never Fun For Anybody"

Meanwhile Xbox execs:

It's fun for the people making more profit.

I remember when GamePass was first announced and everybody lauded Microsoft for being “pro-consumer” and outright cheered when they started buying up independent studios.

I remember being downvoted to oblivion for pointing out the very obvious 5 year plan for GP and the fact that it would go… exactly the way it’s currently going.

Never fun for anybody

Meanwhile, at Microsoft:

Raising the price of hardware twice since May and now raising the price of game pass by 50% is not something a company would do if they're interested in competing against Sony or Nintendo. Clearly Microsoft has thrown in the towel on XBOX. Only thing left for Microsoft to do is announce cancellation of next gen console altogether and do layoffs. I don't know when that will happen but it's inevitable at this point.

They're also upping the sub price for some home user office plans. Apparently it's milk the customer time at microsoft.

Lol, but here's one anyway. - Microsoft

Especially for the companies who disappear because they were too greedy.

Microsoft was never going to make gaming affordable. The entire goal of GP is like any subscription service, to get you hooked so they can increase the prices. Microsoft is not and never was a pro consumer company. And GamePass is Microsoft’s attempt at making a hardwareless console. It’s a BYOD walled garden. It’s bad for consumers and bad for developers and publishers. Consumers will own nothing and studios are beholden to MS gatekeepers. Some account manager basically decides how much the devs will be financially compensated before the game is even released, instead of letting the market decide. Remember those court documents which showed how much they under valued Baldur’s Gate 3. If you think the standard 30% store cut is outrageous GamePass is on another level of bad. Sure they are currently showering devs in cash, but once MS has a significant chunk of the market they are going to turn off that tap. We’ve seen it with Netflix and Spotify. Like even the most popular artists earn fractions of cents per user.

Sacrifice the future for a temporary revenue/profit go up

but we're trying to reinforce by adding more value to these plans as well."
Fortnite Crew and Ubisoft+ Classics

So if you don't play Fortnite and aren't interested in 15 different Assassin's Creed titles, fuck you I guess

Canceled.

They've made very clear that they're reducing functionality, dropping products including their gaming companies, and raising prices across the board to somehow come up with billions for AI. They no longer care about their customers or employees, only this holy grail quest for money that will evaporate. Dump Microsoft.

Thank you captain obvious?

It's something we don't take lightly, and we're listening to the feedback of players and the community to try to provide them with more of what they’re asking for.

God they will never understand that we see right through their bullshit corpo-speak answers will they. Everything they just said is nothing. They don't take it lightly. They are listening. They will try. There is nothing concrete in that wet paper towel of an answer.

You're selling an underpowered console that spies on the home for 800usd. Stfu about the price being tough on the company