For years, Microsoft has been offering an Xbox Game Pass $1 introductory offer, used to bring in new subscribers to familiarize them with Xbox’s greatest gaming offering for a single dollar before asking them to pay full price. Now, the company has officially winded up that offer, revealing that it still plans to explore other marketing strategies for new subscribers going forward.
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The $1 introductory offer for the Ultimate and PC tiers of Xbox Game Pass let users enjoy over 400 games and even Xbox Cloud Gaming with the former for an incomparably low cost for the first month, and has likely been a major reason for the service’s growth in the last few years. Now that it has been officially terminated, Microsoft intends to promote the service to new users in different ways:
We have stopped our previous introductory offer for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass and are evaluating different marketing promotions for new members in the future.
Any new “marketing promotions” are fairly likely to be focused around the Friends & Family Game Pass plan that Microsoft has been slowly rolling out throughout the world, currently with the notable exceptions of the U.K. and the U.S. The $1 introductory offer will probably remain a thing of the past, though, considering the company’s admission that Xbox Game Pass “cannibalizes” video game sales.
(Microsoft’s comments were provided by The Verge.)
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