The name Xbox Live has been ubiquitous to console gaming since the early 2000s, as Microsoft brought the first online subscription for online play to consoles. Today, Microsoft announced it's officially sunsetting the name and rolling it into its Xbox Game Pass offerings in September.
Xbox Live has been part of Microsoft's Xbox Game Pass subscription since its inception, but before you could have a Live sub without the Game Pass benefits, that seems to be changing now. In a post on the Xbox Wire, Microsoft announced its evolving Xbox Live into Xbox Game Pass Core, bringing the benefits of both for the same price.
"With this evolution, we’re saying farewell to Games with Gold. We wanted to use this opportunity to re-imagine how to include content with this subscription. We found that the answer to the most compelling catalog was to leverage select titles from our Xbox Game Pass catalog."
As such, Xbox Game Pass Core will cost $9.99 and include the existing benefits of Xbox Live Gold, as well as a curated collection of games from Game Pass, including titles such as The Elder Scrolls Online, Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, Fallout 76, Halo 5: Guardians and more. This will expand with new titles being added a few times a year, according to Xbox.
The existing Game Pass subscription tiers look to be unchanged otherwise, with Game Pass Ultimate giving access to titles across PC and console and to EA Play. Confusingly, it seems the base tier of Xbox Game Pass for either PC or Console don't include the online multiplayer components, simple Core and Ultimate. This will likely tip people into the Ultimate subscription tier, as it's cheaper than having a Core and then stand-alone console or PC Game Pass sub.
These changes won't take place until September 14th. Also going away with Xbox Live Gold is its Games for Gold program, which gave free games each month to players for having a Gold sub. Those games that were given away on Xbox 360 will be yours to keep regardless, though Xbox One games redeemed via this program will only be playable moving forward with a Core or Ultimate subscription. This will come to an end on September 1st.
Microsoft has had a busy month. From winning in court against the FTC recently to announcing its inked a deal to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation should the Activision Blizzard merger go through, Microsoft now needs to overcome its final hurdle with the UK's CMA.
