Following confirmation that Microsoft has successfully acquired Activision Blizzard, the cost of several Activision games has risen. Many have speculated that this is ahead of the games making their way on to the Xbox game pass.
These price increases were documented by SteamDB, a website dedicated to the tracking and archiving of sale information on Steam. The severity of the price hike ranges from game to game and region to region, but is seen rising by £2 for Halo 3 and by £4 for The Master Chief Collection, among others.
Other regions have seen more dramatic price increases for Microsoft's other games. Turkey and Brazil reportedly saw even the 2003 version of Call of Duty rising from $9 to $19. This may simply be a case of bad timing as many other games in the region had to raise their prices to meet Valve's demands, but one Twitter user shared a list of dramatic price hikes for several Call of Duty games and even newer games like Crash Bandicoot 4.
It's undeniable that the game pass has been a big part of Xbox's strategy in recent years, so pushing players away from Steam and into their subscription model is surely just one of the many business schemes we'll see in the coming years. Consumers can hardly be blamed for the game pass' popularity; it's a much cheaper way to play the newest games, even if you don't technically own them.
A Ubisoft executive recently foresaw the death of physical game sales, and with that company taking exclusive streaming rights to Activision Blizzard's games, we'll likely see these subtle pushes towards streaming and the game pass get much stronger.