We've Seen This Loading Screen Before: Is Xbox Game Pass Heading for a Netflix-Style Crash?

Cast your mind back, if you will, to the golden era of Netflix. A tenner a month. Unlimited films. No adverts. The smug satisfaction of cancelling your Sky subscription and watching your mates slowly do the same. It felt like the future had finally arrived, and it had brought a decent broadband connection with it.

Then, gradually, it didn't feel quite so golden. Prices crept up. Beloved shows vanished overnight. Password sharing became a federal offence. And suddenly that tenner was closer to eighteen quid, shared between fewer people, for a library that seemed to shrink even as it technically expanded.

Sound familiar? It should. Because right now, Xbox Game Pass is doing a very convincing impression of Netflix circa 2019 — and that should make every British subscriber at least a little bit nervous.

The Promise Was Brilliant. It Still Kind of Is.

Let's be fair to Microsoft, because fairness matters even when you're being provocative. When Game Pass launched properly in the UK, it was genuinely transformative. Day-one access to first-party Xbox titles. A rotating library of hundreds of games. The ability to try something rubbish for free rather than spend forty-five pounds discovering you hate it. For cash-conscious gamers — and let's be honest, the cost of living crisis has made every British household more cash-conscious — it felt like a genuine lifeline.

The pitch was simple: why buy games when you can rent the entire shop?

For a while, that pitch held up. Titles like Hi-Fi Rush, Starfield, and Forza Motorsport landed day one on Game Pass and made the value proposition feel almost embarrassingly generous. Microsoft was practically throwing money at subscribers, seemingly content to build loyalty now and worry about profit margins later.

Here's the thing about 'later', though. It always arrives.

The Price Hike No One Wanted to Talk About

Earlier this year, UK Game Pass subscribers got the kind of email nobody enjoys opening. Prices were going up. Game Pass Core, the entry-level tier, rose. Game Pass Ultimate — the one most dedicated subscribers were actually using — climbed to £14.99 a month. And the mid-tier PC Game Pass option shuffled upwards too.

In isolation, these aren't catastrophic numbers. Fourteen-odd quid for hundreds of games still looks decent on paper. But context is everything. This is the second significant price increase in relatively short order. The trajectory is pointing in one direction, and it isn't down.

Netflix raised its prices gradually too. Each individual hike seemed reasonable. It was only when you zoomed out and compared what you were paying in 2016 to what you were paying in 2023 that the full picture became uncomfortable.

Microsoft is following the same playbook, page by page.

The Catalogue Question Nobody Wants to Answer

There's another wrinkle that doesn't get discussed nearly enough: what's actually in the library, and for how long?

Game Pass has always operated on a rotating model — games come, games go. That was understood from the start. But the removals have started to sting a bit more lately, particularly as Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard raised hopes of a truly extraordinary catalogue. The reality has been more complicated. Some titles have arrived. Others have conspicuously not. And a few games that subscribers had grown attached to have quietly disappeared without much fanfare.

There's also the growing issue of tiering. Not everything is available on every tier. Want cloud gaming? That's Ultimate only. Want day-one access to certain titles? Check the small print. The clean simplicity of the original offer is slowly being replaced by a matrix of options that requires a spreadsheet to fully understand.

Again: Netflix introduced multiple tiers. Then an ad-supported tier. Then started restricting features based on which tier you were on. The destination is rarely as clean as the departure.

Are British Gamers Getting a Fair Deal?

This is where it gets specifically uncomfortable for UK subscribers. We've been hit by the same price increases as everyone else, but we're doing it in an economy where energy bills, food costs, and general financial misery have been doing their own damage for the better part of three years.

The pound's relationship with the dollar means UK pricing often absorbs international cost pressures in a particularly unpleasant way. When Microsoft adjusts global pricing, British subscribers rarely come out ahead. And unlike some markets, we don't have the same breadth of competing subscription services to use as leverage.

For a household with one or two regular gamers, Game Pass Ultimate at £14.99 a month is £180 a year. That's not nothing. That's a decent chunk of a next-gen game budget, or several months of another subscription service. The value calculation only works if you're actually using the library — and research consistently shows that most subscribers, much like Netflix users, cycle through a small handful of titles rather than ravenously consuming the entire catalogue.

So Should You Cancel?

Here's where the 'balanced' part of 'provocative but balanced' comes in: not necessarily. Not yet.

Game Pass still represents solid value if you're an active player who genuinely explores its library. If you're the kind of person who downloaded Pentiment, Vampire Survivors, and Jusant because they were just there and free, you're getting your money's worth. If you're primarily using it to play one franchise and nothing else, the maths are getting harder to justify.

The real concern isn't today's price or today's catalogue. It's the direction of travel. Every decision Microsoft has made in the past eighteen months — the tiering, the price increases, the inconsistent day-one availability, the Activision integration moving slower than promised — points toward a service that is gradually optimising for revenue rather than subscriber delight.

Netflix didn't become disappointing overnight. It became disappointing through a hundred small decisions that each seemed defensible in isolation.

The Load Screen Is Getting Longer

There's a particular kind of frustration that British gamers know well: the loading screen that seems to go on just a little too long. You're not sure whether to wait it out or restart. You've invested time already. Walking away feels wasteful. But standing there staring at a spinning icon while nothing obviously improves is its own kind of misery.

That's where Game Pass is right now. The loading screen is getting longer. The value that was so obvious in 2021 is taking more squinting to see in 2025. And Microsoft, for all its resources and goodwill, hasn't yet given us a compelling reason to believe the game that eventually loads will be worth the wait.

It might be. The Activision catalogue could yet deliver something extraordinary. A killer exclusive could reset the conversation entirely.

But we've watched this particular cutscene before. And we remember how it ended.

Dot Hargreaves is a features writer at Load Screen News. She has strong opinions about subscription services and even stronger opinions about loading screens.