Xbox Free Games With Gold Making Huge Change Later This Year

gamerant.com:

Xbox Games with Gold is a program that was started in 2013 and provided Xbox Live Gold subscribers with two free Xbox 360 games per month. The program was then expanded to include Xbox One games as well, for a total four free games per month for Xbox Live Gold subscribers. In the years since, however, this project has become overshadowed, especially since Xbox introduced Xbox Game Pass, and many now believe that the Games with Gold scheme is slowly on its way out.

To its credit, Games with Gold has been meeting its goal of four free games per month for almost eight years straight, although many players claim the quality of the games provided by Games with Gold has slipped since the scheme’s first few years.

Xbox Free Games With Gold Games for July 2022 Revealed

Microsoft has now announced that it will be no longer be providing Xbox 360 games as part of Xbox Games with Gold, beginning on October 1, 2022. This means that the free Xbox 360 games for the month of September will be the last from the scheme. Games with Gold is still going to continue with Xbox One games for the foreseeable future, but the program's output will be reduced to two games per month.

This will be disappointing for many Games with Gold users who made use of their free Xbox 360 games, but also to those who suspect that this is the beginning of the end for the Games with Gold program altogether. Xbox has been increasingly pushing Xbox Game Pass as its flagship program for the past five years, and in that time, Games with Gold has become increasingly hidden away behind sub-menus on the Xbox home screen. Xbox Live Gold is already included with Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, and so it is likely that the Game Pass program will someday take over from Xbox Live