Asha Sharma’s Xbox appears to be preparing new tiers of its Game Pass subscription service.
References to a “Starter Edition” tier of the service were found in code by third-party Xbox Cloud Gaming developer Redphx (via Windows Central). They were then linked to a Discord partnership – something Asha Sharma teased recently – via leaked images on Discord-watching X account Discord Preview.
According to the leaked images, Game Pass Starter Edition will be bundled with Discord Nitro for $9.99 a month and offer 50-plus games, 10 hours a month of cloud-streaming game time, and Xbox rewards. It’s similar to the existing Essential tier of Game Pass obviously with the addition of Discord Nitro, which alone costs $9.99 (£7.99) a month, so should this be true, there’s value on offer.
That Xbox would offer new tiers of Game Pass tallies with recent public messaging. Overnight, Xbox leaders Asha Sharma and Matt Booty issued an open letter about the future of Xbox, and in a section about Game Pass, said the subscription service needed fortifying with “clear differentiation and sustainable economics”. Does more tiers of Game Pass satisfy this?
Currently, there are three tiers of Xbox Game Pass, Essential, Premium and Ultimate, priced in the UK at £6.99, £10.99, and £16.99 a month respectively. Note that the Ultimate Game Pass price was recently reduced from £22.99 a month as part of Asha Sharma’s Xbox push. For reference, PlayStation offers a similar three-tier plan at almost exactly the same price.
Windows Central’s Jez Corden goes on to report that they’ve heard Asha Sharma wants to make Game Pass more “modular and customisable”, potentially giving you the freedom to pick and choose which elements of it you’d like. Perhaps we saw an element of this when Microsoft removed Call of Duty from the day-one Xbox Game Pass offering recently, which allowed it to lower the overall cost. What if you could tweak which things you wanted in order to get a personalised Game Pass plan? It’s an intriguing idea.
