Introducing Xbox Game Pass Core, Coming This September

Games with Gold literally gave you ownership of a game. This is a subscription that gives you access to games. That’s more than a semantic difference and is a trend we have to be wary of.

Games with Gold literally gave you ownership of a game.
Did they? I was under the impression that the games you collect with Gold won't start if your subscription runs out similar to PS+.
- 360 games gave ownership, XB1 games require and active sub just like PS plus.
- I think they meant more with Gold you always have access to those games. With a sub the available games can come and go, so you may lose access to specific games if they leave the service.
No longer an xbox user but for what one would pay in a year on this it would be cheaper to just pick them up in the steam sales over time.
- !fucksubscriptions
Games with Gold only gave your permanent licenses for Xbox and Xbox 360 games. Xbox One games were limited to the console you claimed them on, I believe. Or they could only be played from your account. I know it wasn’t as ‘far reaching’ as the 360 games were.
GwG only gave ownership of 360 titles. All XB1 titles required an active subscription so this isn’t a recent change.

The enshittification of Xbox live has begun, as we all predicted it would when gamepass became a thing.

Enshittification of Xbox Live was day one of launch, dude. Online used to be free, nobody charged for it until Xbox did.
- Look we're not going to have this argument, it's been had a billion times on the internet. I'm a PC guy, paying for online is dumb. But a lot of people do and the service they get from it is going to be getting worse and more expensive in the future.
As long as they don't change my $60/yr price point, I'm ok with it. I never really played too many of the games with gold games anyway.
- Oh boy just you wait.

Yeah, for $1 (between 9.99 and 10.99) this is just a price decoy / asymmetric dominance exercise.

Wiki

Core will go away (or at least deprioritized from a marketing perspective) once they’ve successfully transitioned everyone off GfG.

Gamepass console doesn’t include online multiplayer. You need ultimate at 15 a month to get both the gamepass library and online play.
- Ah man, that’s kinda goofy. I have PC Game Pass and I know they’re technically different products.

From the markers of Xbox, Xbox One and Xbox Series, get the best deal of gaming with GamePass Core, GamePass Console, GamePass PC and GamePass Ultimate!

So…Gold once gave us 2 Xbox One and 1 360 game a month to keep for as long as we had Gold, regardless if they were in the “library” or not.

In the last 12 months, the service has “evolved” to just a tiny part of the Game Pass library and pretty much nothing else.

Glad I’ve got a PS5 instead of a Series X because this “service” has completely died.

This is why I'm not happy with the Activision aquisition. It'd be one thing if Microsoft had become a pioneer of QOL improvements for the consumer. But they're not making any improvements. They're regressing. At least Sony still feels like they're trying to evolve into a better corporation. Their shift to Stars was mostly an upgrade. Microsoft continues to be anti-consumer at every chance they get.

They increased ultimate price too

I wonder how long before a triple A game on PC has paid online, and which publisher will do it. 80€ for the game, 45€ for the season pass, 15€/month for online, 5€ for each additional multiplayer map, 2€ for each character skin.
- World of Warcraft
If accessible multiplayer is the metric, then the closed system of Steam makes it a poor recommendation. The cross-platform Epic Online Services available to any developer and store is better.
Then conversely, Steam offers the Big Picture mode making it easier to navigate for those used to consoles, though the beauty of PC is that you can use both and for free.

Personally I'm fine with this. It would be nice to get a refresh more often than "2 to 3 times a year" though...