Rumor: Xbox Live Gold to disappear when Game Pass is in a healthy position

There are more than a few times that members of this house have done the same analysis. With the future looking better and better for Xbox Game Pass, the mere existence of Xbox Live Gold is a problem for the brand and the flagship subscription. It’s clear that today it’s still a lion’s share of Xbox Live’s bill, but its future is increasingly uncertain.

Discontinuing Xbox Live Gold would give Microsoft a huge boost in terms of its ability to attract new players. This mass would in turn be likely to purchase Xbox Game Pass. The added value that Redmond is putting on the Ultimate edition is no coincidence either, they know that what it offers could be little in the future if they were to consider a moderate price increase. But that’s another matter.

With the elimination of the need for Xbox Live Gold to play free-to-play games, the speculation about the death of this subscription is back. It has been sounded loudly in the past by prominent voices such as Windows Central and Jeff Grubb, who has proven to have a very high accuracy rate and verified information from Microsoft insiders. Everything he said about Xbox E3 2021 came true to the letter.

Now, Grubb himself on his podcast has spoken on the subject again, arguing that it’s still on the table at Microsoft right now, but he doesn’t know what stage it’s at.

I knew they were going to make a change before Halo Infinite, and I thought it would at least be removed for free-to-play games because they weren’t going to charge people to play Halo on Xbox when they weren’t charging you to play it on PC. or whatever.

So they decided to raise the price and it looked weird, right? Why would they do that if they were going to ditch Xbox Live Gold?

I just wanted to reiterate that Xbox Live Gold is still on a board somewhere saying ‘this is going to go away at some point’. If they’re actively talking about it right now, I don’t know, but they still have it on a roadmap that says Xbox Live Gold will be dropped at some point in the future.

The journalist went on to argue that everything seems to indicate that Xbox Live Gold is going to disappear when Xbox Game Pass is in a healthy position, and for that, he puts figures: Between 50 and 50 million subscribers. He also believes that the topic will return to the discussion table when the service reaches 30 million subscribers.

They’re fine right now, but before E3 things were starting to slow down and I think maybe there were some people at Microsoft that were getting a little nervous about it because they’re like, ‘we need this thing to grow’, the problem is who were waiting for the big games to come to the service.

It seems like E3 really helped Game Pass take a step forward where people can now look to the future and say, ‘If I get it now I’m going to have all these games, but then there will be this and this and this for the foreseeable future. , and then these great things on the horizon. ‘

So Microsoft is keeping the focus on getting user acquisition, and that means’ Xbox Live will go away, but we need to hit a certain threshold with Game Pass before we can make that decision and disconnect that revenue stream because we have enough that it comes from something else.