Microsoft’s new Xbox Game Pass Core will replace Xbox Live Gold in September
By Tom Warren, a senior editor covering Microsoft, PC gaming, console, and tech. He founded WinRumors, a site dedicated to Microsoft news, before joining The Verge in 2012.
Microsoft is launching a new Xbox Game Pass Core subscription to replace Xbox Live Gold. This new Game Pass Core offering will include the usual Xbox online console multiplayer support, deals and discounts, and a new small catalog of more than 25 games — including Gears 5, Forza Horizon 4, and Psychonauts 2.
Existing Xbox Live Gold members will be automatically transferred across to Xbox Game Pass Core on September 14th, with the service priced at the same rate of $9.99 per month (or $59.99 per year) as Xbox Live Gold.
As part of this replacement subscription, Microsoft is discontinuing Games with Gold on September 1st, the perk that has allowed Xbox owners to grab free games monthly for a decade and add them to their content library. Any Xbox 360 titles that were redeemed in the past will be permanently kept in a library, but Xbox One titles will rely on an ongoing subscription to Xbox Game Pass Core or Game Pass Ultimate.
The more than 25 games that Microsoft is including in Game Pass Core are designed to replace Games with Gold, and Microsoft says it will add new titles two to three times a year.
“We wanted to use this opportunity to reimagine how to include content with this subscription,” says Jerret West, CVP of gaming marketing at Xbox. “We found that the answer to the most compelling catalog was to leverage select titles from our Xbox Game Pass catalog.”
This catalog of games will be a lot more limited than the full Xbox Game Pass subscription ($10.99 a month), and Microsoft is only confirming 19 of the launch list titles today:
Xbox Game Pass
Read more on theverge.com
