Gamers on Xbox consoles will be familiar with the Xbox Live Gold subscription service that offers online play with players around the world. In September, Microsoft will sunset that service as well as the Games with Gold benefit, replacing it with a new tier of the popular Xbox Game Pass service called Xbox Game Pass Core.
Xbox Game Pass Core is set to launch this year on Sept. 14. Microsoft describes the new service as “an evolution of Xbox Live Gold” that will “bring online play together with Game Pass, and a select collection of over 25 games in a new offering for gamers around the world.”
One of our favorite values in gaming, Xbox Game Pass offers hundreds of games you can play on console, PC and the cloud for a monthly fee. It'll soon be getting a new "Core" option that gets you online play and a small library of essential titles for $10 per month.
Xbox Game Pass Core is effectively rolling up the features of Xbox Live Gold. It will provide online console multiplayer and a selection of free games to play on Xbox Series X, Series S and Xbox One. Active subscribers to Xbox Live Gold will automatically become members of the new service and continue to pay the same rate at $10 monthly or $60 annually. Notably, Microsoft isn’t using this opportunity to raise prices like it attempted for Xbox Live Gold in early 2021 only to promptly back down.
The new service is also filling in for the Games with Gold benefit, which provided a small selection of games each month for subscribers to claim. As such, Xbox Games with Gold will end Sept. 1. Players who claimed Xbox One games through the old service will continue to have access to them as long as they remain subscribed to Game Pass Ultimate or Game Pass Core. Any claimed Xbox 360 games will remain available even for users who don’t maintain a subscription.
Subscribers will then get access to the new collection of Game Pass Core games. The collection will start with a selection of more than 25 popular titles, including Gears 5, Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, Grounded and Elder Scrolls Online: Tamriel Unlimited. Microsoft will continue to add to the collection two to three times per year.
This new subscription tier will offer Xbox console gamers a cheaper way to play online than the Xbox Game Pass Ultimate tier. However, it also offers a considerably more limited scope than that higher tier, which provides access to a much larger game library (on both Xbox and PC) and includes an EA Play membership. Still, for gamers who might have a few favorite online games, the new tier will continue to provide a cheaper option for playing online.
