Greetings, Arsians! The Dealmaster is back with another round of bargains to share. Today’s list is headlined by a deal over at Microsoft that gets you a month of the company’s Xbox Game Pass Ultimate service for $1 or two months for $2. Normally, a Game Pass Ultimate membership—which wraps Game Pass for console and PC together with Xbox Live Gold—costs $15 a month.
This offer has admittedly been live for a while now, but Microsoft says the $2 deal is set to expire on September 30. (The company declined to specify when the $1 offer will end.) Plus, you could still turn the discount into an even better value with the right planning.
To explain: we noted this back when Microsoft first ran this deal earlier in the year, but when you buy Game Pass Ultimate, the company will still turn up to 36 months of existing Xbox Live Gold (or non-Ultimate Game Pass) subscription time on your account into the all-in-one membership. That means you can stock up on Xbox Live Gold first—which many Xbox players will buy anyway to play online—then add up to three years of Game Pass to that prepaid time for $1 instead of the usual $10 (for console) or $5 (for PC) a month. Put another way: after getting three 12-month Xbox Live Gold codes for $60 each, you could get three years of Game Pass Ultimate for $181 instead of the $540 it would cost at full price. (Or two years for $121 instead of $360, one year for $61 instead of $180, etc.)
The catch is that these offers are only available to those who are new to Game Pass Ultimate, not existing subscribers. If you have a standard Game Pass subscription for console or PC, though, you can still take advantage. It’s also worth noting that Game Pass Ultimate subscription time can’t be reverted back to individual Xbox Live Gold or standard Game Pass subscriptions after upgrading—your account won’t be locked into the Ultimate plan forever, just the prepaid time up to 36 months. But you’ll have to turn off recurring billing and re-join those other services separately if you don’t want to renew Game Pass Ultimate once that prepaid time expires.
As a refresher, Game Pass makes a bundle of Xbox games available to download and play at a fixed monthly cost. (Think of it like a gaming Netflix, without the streaming.) Whether or not the service is worth having will, as always, come down to the games you prefer. But its lineup is growing—there are currently more than 200 games on consoles and more than 100 on PC—and while there’s certainly some filler, we’d say a good chunk of the library is genuinely worthwhile. Microsoft is probably happy to have people buy years of Xbox Live Gold in advance when it has a new console coming next year. So if you do make the conversion to Ultimate, make sure to only get the amount of subscription time you’re comfortable with or at least be sure that you’ll still be using the Xbox One for the foreseeable future. And if you don’t want to convert, the two-month deal is still a good way to beat and for $2.
If you’re not an Xbox person, though, we also have a ton of Prime-only deals on Amazon devices (just note that new hardware of some sort is coming), pre-order discounts on the latest Apple Watch and iPad, headphone discounts, and more. You can take a look at the full list below.
