Microsoft says Xbox All Access, its subscription program to buy an Xbox, Xbox Game Pass, and Xbox Live, will end on Dec. 31, return in a revised format in 2019
Context & Ripple Effects
Xbox All Access is barely four months old: Microsoft unveiled the two-year, $22-or-$35-per-month contract bundling an Xbox One S or One X with Xbox Game Pass and Xbox Live Gold in late August, and now it is switching the program off on Dec. 31 ahead of a promised revised format in 2019.
The pause lands mid-restructuring of the underlying subscriptions themselves — in April Microsoft folded Live and Game Pass into a single $14.99-per-month Game Pass Ultimate tier — so the bundle's component pricing was already being rebuilt underneath it. The program did come back: a year later Microsoft relaunched it at a lower $20 entry price with a Project Scarlett upgrade path and took it to the UK and Australia (the October 2019 revival).
First-order effects
- Prospective US buyers lose the only Microsoft-sanctioned way to finance a console bundled with Game Pass and Live after Dec. 31, leaving outright purchase as the default until the revised format arrives.
- Microsoft freezes new enrollment in a program it had positioned as its flagship hardware-plus-services offer, while existing subscribers ride out contracts signed under the August terms.
Second-order effects
- The 2019 relaunch resets the economics rather than merely restoring them: the revived program starts at $20 per month versus the original $22 floor, adds a Project Scarlett upgrade option, and expands beyond the US to the UK and Australia.
- Retail partners selling the bundle lose a differentiated financing SKU during the gap, while Game Pass Ultimate's merged Live-and-Game Pass pricing gives Microsoft a cleaner single subscription to anchor any revised bundle around.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, console hardware stops being a standalone purchase and becomes the loss-leader inside a services contract that gets repriced and re-geographed each generation — the console-to-service flywheel with financing attached.
- A shutdown-and-relaunch cycle for subscription programs becomes a normal Microsoft playbook move rather than a failure signal, as long as each revision deepens the services tie-in.
The trend: Console makers are converting one-time hardware sales into iterated hardware-plus-subscription contracts, with the subscription lineup's own consolidation dictating when the bundles get torn down and rebuilt.