Prominent industry insider Jeff Grubb believes that Microsoft is planning to get rid of its base Xbox Live Gold subscription once Xbox Game Pass receives milestone subscribers. In his Grubbsnax show on Giant Bomb, Jeff Grubb reiterated the claim, which he made quite a while ago.
According to Grubb, Xbox removing the requirement for Xbox Live Gold for free-to-play multiplayer experiences as well as Halo Infinite‘s multiplayer being free-to-play indicates that the Redmond-based giant plans to eventually phase the subscription out sometime in the future.
“I just wanted to reiterate, Xbox Live Gold is still on a board somewhere saying ‘this is going to go away at some point,'” Grubb said, “Whether or not they’re actively talking about it right now, I don’t know, but they still have it on a roadmap saying ‘Xbox Live Gold will be dropped at some point in the future’.”
“Microsoft’s just kind of heads down on getting user acquisition, and that means ‘Xbox Live will go away but we need to get to a certain threshold with Game Pass before we can make that choice and unplug that revenue source because we have enough coming from something else,'” he added.
The speculation itself is plausible, since Microsoft did try to raise the prices for the subscription but had to drop its plans following fan backlash on the matter. Xbox Games With Gold continues to be an after-thought, seemingly in an effort to push more people to buy into Xbox Game Pass instead.
