Xbox Game Pass tiers have gotten way more confusing than necessary

The service’s middle “premium” tier probably shouldn't exist

When Microsoft announced a revamped tier system for Xbox Game Pass in October 2025, it unleashed a whole lot of grumbling about what was once fondly regarded as “the best deal in games.” The service’s first batch of games for January features some heavy hitters, including Resident Evil Village and the underrated Star Wars Outlaws. But distinguishing between what’s actually “new” to the service and what’s simply being made available to another tier is far more confusing than it needs to be.

Out of 11 games “coming” to Game Pass in early January, four have already been available as part of the service’s highest tier, Game Pass Ultimate. These include Atomfall, Lost in Random: The Eternal Die, Rematch, and Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine – Master Crafted Edition. It’s good that games are coming to lower tiers so more people can play them, but it’s not accurate to imply they’re new to the service as a whole. The problem here is multifaceted: If you’re a top-tier Ultimate subscriber, these four games are stuff you’ve already seen. At the same time, mid-tier subscribers won’t be able to access two of the 11 early January games: Star Wars Outlaws and Mio: Memories in Orbit. Either way, it’s a little dissatisfying.

It doesn’t have to be this way! The early iterations of Game Pass were dead simple: everyone got access to the same library of games, and the only distinction was whether you wanted to play on console, PC, or both. Now, we have Ultimate, Premium, and Essential. The names of the current tiers certainly don’t help: you’d be forgiven for not knowing whether Premium or Ultimate is the best one. To be fair, Xbox has never had a knack for catchy names — this is, after all, the same company who ditched the unusually catchy codename Project Scarlett for the lisp-inducing Xbox Series X and Series S, which is groaningly similar to the Xbox One X and One S models it replaced.

When something is confusing — like getting a refund from an airline or using health insurance — people often assume it’s their fault for not understanding. But there are plenty of instances where this isn’t the case at all, because the confusion is entirely intentional. The goal here may be to keep people spooked by the price hike from leaving, while also keeping them around and eventually convincing them to splurge for the highest tier. Game Pass Premium is a liminal space you either downgrade or upgrade from — and likely a way to justify making Ultimate $30 instead of $25.

Game Pass certainly isn’t the first subscription service to capture a huge user base, then hike up the price. But after a chaotic year for Xbox, it’s hard not to see the confounding tier system as another symptom of Microsoft’s pivot to Microslop, brute-forcing inelegant solutions to manufactured problems.