Xbox Game Pass Core to Replace Xbox Live Gold on September 14

It’s official, Microsoft’s Xbox Live Gold subscription will officially become Xbox Game Pass Core on September 14. The new subscription will continue to provide access to online multiplayer and exclusive game deals, and the price will remain at $9.99/month or $59.99/year. However, the monthly Games with Gold titles are going away and will be replaced by a collection of over 25 games from the Game Pass catalog.

Xbox Live Gold officially launched over 20 years ago on November 15, 2002, so this is pretty much the end of an era. Since the launch of Xbox Game Pass back in June 2017, Microsoft slowly but surely started to de-emphasize Xbox Live Gold while including its benefits in its Xbox Game Pass Ultimate tier.

“Game Pass Core brings online play together with Game Pass in a new offering for gamers around the world,” the Xbox team explained today. “With this evolution, we’re saying farewell to Games with Gold. We wanted to use this opportunity to re-imagine how to include content with this subscription. We found that the answer to the most compelling catalog was to leverage select titles from our Xbox Game Pass catalog.”

On September 14, existing Xbox Live Gold members will automatically transition to the new Xbox Game Pass Core subscription. If the Games with Gold program will end on September 1, subscribers will be able to keep playing all the Xbox One Games with Gold titles that they previously redeemed as long as they keep their subscription active. However, any Xbox 360 titles that were previously redeemed via Games with Gold will be forever kept in a player’s library.

With the transition to Xbox Game Pass Core, Xbox Live Gold will get access to the following games on September 14, and Microsoft says that it will add new titles to this collection of over 25 games 2-3 times a year:

• Among Us
• Descenders
• Dishonored 2
• Doom Eternal
• Fable Anniversary
• Fallout 4
• Fallout 76
• Forza Horizon 4
• Gears 5
• Grounded
• Halo 5: Guardians
• Halo Wars 2
• Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice
• Human Fall Flat
• Inside
• Ori & The Will of the Wisps
• Psychonauts 2
• State of Decay 2
• The Elder Scrolls Online: Tamriel Unlimited

With Xbox Live Gold becoming Xbox Game Pass Core, the total number of Game Pass subscribers should see a pretty big bump. Microsoft announced back in January 2022 that it had 25 million Game Pass subscribers, a number that includes Xbox Game Pass, PC Game Pass, and Xbox Game Pass Ultimate.

Overall, the transition from Xbox Live Gold to Xbox Game Pass Core seems like the right thing to do to simplify Microsoft’s various game subscription services. While the Xbox Game Pass Core library of games isn’t exactly impressive, subscribers should be more incentivized to upgrade to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate if they want to access the full Game Pass catalog as well as Microsoft’s first-party games on day one.