This is Steve Downs, the voice of Master Chief, Sierra 117, and you're listening to podcast unlocked the world's number one Xbox podcast.

Now finish this fight.

Master Chief, out.

Hello and welcome to podcast unlocked episode 573. I'm Rana Santos filling in for Ryan McCaffrey while he is out in about NLA covering the game awards

but with me for this episode unlocked we are very busy. There is a lot of news happening is a very familiar group of folks that you should know and hopefully love I love them. So we're gonna have a good time.

But joining me in the San Francisco office is Stella Chung, welcome welcome. Happy to be here. Yeah, then of course away from the office is Destiny Gary welcome welcome.

Welcome welcome. Very quick note, Destiny. I love how you always have a green background and it makes me sort of envious that I need to have a green background from my office.

I switched the colors and I switched the animation on the TV every episode. Fantastic. Fantastic. And joining us again is Taylor Liles. Thank you so much for joining us. Welcome.

Thank you for having me again. Yay. But yeah, before we get started because there is a lot going on this December.

I just wanted to give a shout out to something we have going on this week at IGN, which is the game awards airing live. In fact, they may already have started and ended by the time you're listening to this episode.

But if you happen to catch this before then we will be airing the game awards on IGN December 8th beginning at 4 p.m. pt 7 p.m. ET. Of course you can catch new trailers and reveals announcements world pumerous and of course the award winners.

We will also have a nice wrap up article for that in case you happen to miss the show. We just want to see what are the biggest announcements and of course the biggest winners were.

We will have a pre and post show for that as always and I will be on of course talking a lot about Xbox and other things too. So don't forget to check that out.

We can just jump in straight into the news because we have a lot to cover and that makes for a very exciting December. Maybe not the most exciting news to start with as far as enthusiasm goes but definitely an important one is that we finally got the announcement that the first party Xbox Series X and S games prices will be going up to a flat $70 or $10.69 USD.

But this has been a long time coming we've known that you know just with the state of things it's inevitable that this will happen.

I want to go to you first because I know we've been talking about price a lot whenever it comes to numbers or illegal things I'm like alright what does it have to say so.

This is pretty cut and dry they're increasing the price to 70 bucks do I like it now. Not at all.

The games they talk about are games like forks and motorsport red fall and starfield so these are like bespoke next gen experiences I don't know how long we use the term next gen once a new console launch has been two years but stuff made for the series X in the series S specifically.

So they said as with all games developed by our teams at Xbox they will also be available with game past the same day they launch so what they're trying to do obviously is emphasize just how good of value game pass will be as games increase in price.

Phil Spencer hinted that this would be happening in the near future he said either games the price of game pass or the price of the console would be increasing no comments on the cost of the console going up to reflect the inflation around the world right now and nothing about game pass increasing price so if game pass holds that's great but I would stock up right now if you get a good deal.

Especially with black Friday just hit right now or you can do the one dollar upgrade path I highly recommend you stack that now before you end up buying wind up paying more later I did I did that with game pass I did that with PlayStation plus premium when you can get it on the cheap get it while the

getting good that's what I say that's honestly a great tip to just like if you guys do find a good deal on game pass for the gift cards or whatever it may be just knock up on them it's not going to hurt especially find a good deal.

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