A rare walk-back

Microsoft reversed course on Game Pass pricing in 2026 after a rough stretch of player anger. The October 2025 restructuring had pushed Game Pass Ultimate to $29.99 per month and sparked significant backlash. In April 2026, Microsoft cut prices, bringing Ultimate down to $22.99 per month and PC Game Pass to $13.99, down from $16.49.

Price cuts to a major subscription are unusual, and they signal that the 2025 increase pushed harder than the market would bear. Reporting corroborated the $22.99 and $13.99 figures across multiple outlets, though the exact figures for the Essential and Premium tiers varied by source and are worth double-checking.

The Call of Duty change

The pricing news came bundled with a meaningful policy shift on the service's biggest anchor:

New Call of Duty titles no longer arrive on Game Pass on day one.
They now come to the service roughly a year after release instead.
Existing Call of Duty games remain in the library.

For a service that used day-one Call of Duty as a headline selling point after the Activision acquisition, delaying new entries by a year is a notable trade-off, likely aimed at protecting launch sales.

What it means for subscribers

The net effect is a cheaper subscription with a slightly thinner day-one promise. Players who valued Game Pass primarily for immediate access to the newest Call of Duty will feel the pinch, while those who subscribe for the broad catalog and other first-party day-one releases benefit from the lower monthly cost. Reporting also flagged the possibility that some first-party PC launches could be affected by ongoing tier restructuring, so the fine print is still moving.

Taken together, it reads as Microsoft recalibrating after overreaching. The company tested the ceiling on price, met resistance, and pulled back while quietly reshaping the value equation elsewhere. For subscribers, the practical advice is to check which tier actually matches how you play, since the gap between them now carries different day-one guarantees than it did a year ago.