Xbox Live Gold to be Replaced in October
Microsoft has just announced that their 20-year-long service ‘Xbox Live Gold’ will be shutting down in October this year. This is due to the monthly free games model becoming more and more outdated with game pass’s catalog of over 100 games and the low user counts that make the subscription feel obsolete. You may think, then, that Xbox would just incorporate all users of this into the Xbox game pass for console subscription. However, instead, Microsoft has announced an entirely new service titled ‘Game Pass Core’, which becomes stranger the more you read up on it.
Image by Microsoft
To preface this, there are actually a couple of reasons as to why existing Xbox Live Gold members aren’t being assimilated into the existing console game pass subscription. The first is due to the slight price difference of £1.00/$1.00 between how much Xbox Live currently costs and how much Game Pass on console costs. Although slight, it does make sense not to anger the small market of existing Gold members with an unnecessary price bump. The second, more apparent difference is the fact that the console game pass doesn’t actually include online (which is the main purpose of the original service). Therefore, it does make sense to create a separate model, but it could have been done in a more graceful way.
Image by Microsoft
So, if this new service is also a part of Xbox’s game pass, what makes it different from the regular ‘console’ variant? Well, Game Pass ‘core’ will only contain around a quarter of the entire library offered with the other subscriptions. On top of this, the ‘day one games’ selling point seems to be dropped from this model. Essentially, the only thing that’s changed with this transition is the removal of two monthly games in exchange for a sampling of some of the regular game pass offerings. This means players will have straight-up access to these titles without having to wait for the monthly refresh.
Image by Microsoft
This migration shouldn’t be too much of a surprise- especially considering how Microsoft has leaned more and more into Game Pass while seemingly forgetting about the original Xbox Live Gold service. If you’re happy with your basic subscription at the moment, not much is really going to change, although it may prove enough to give players pause as to whether the upgrade to Game Pass Ultimate (which includes all of Game Pass and online play) is worth an extra few pounds a month. As this is an automatic process, existing subscribers won’t have to do anything to see their new perks come this October. Although considering how limited and arbitrary it is, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a complete sunset of the Xbox Live Gold/Core service before the next console generation.
