A few weeks back, Microsoft announced a new Xbox Game Pass tier, Standard, that doesn’t include day-one releases. In addition, they revealed price increases across all tiers of Game Pass.
Then earlier this week, as part of its appeal against the $69 billion Activision Blizzard acquisition by Microsoft, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) claimed those price increases are “exactly the sort of consumer harm” they were trying to stop by blocking the company’s acquisition.
Now, Xbox responded to the FTC in its own filing on Friday, saying the offering is not “degraded” as has been claimed. The new Standard tier offers multiplayer functionality – something the Game Pass for Console tier it’s replacing did not.
Microsoft goes on to claim that the FTC is trying to shift focus to the games subscription market now Microsoft has relieved regulatory fears it would make Call of Duty exclusive to Xbox.
They say there “remains no evidence anywhere of harm to competition” from the existence of Game Pass, and rival Sony’s subscription service “continues to thrive” even without the same number of day-and-date titles that Microsoft releases.
In addition, the frequent raising of prices across all subscription services works in Microsoft’s favor as they could have raised Game Pass prices anyway, Activision acquisition or not, as a response to their struggles to get new subscribers onboard for Game Pass.
Source: VGC