Earlier this morning Phil Spencer posted a lengthy write up announcing Xbox Game Pass over on the Xbox Wire website. In short, you can download and play any game available in the library for the price of $9.99. Some of the games listed are Halo 5: Guardians, Payday 2, NBA 2K16, and LEGO Batman and some of the publishers that will have their games in the library are 2K, 505 Games, BANDAI NAMCO Entertainment, Capcom, Codemasters, Deep Silver, Focus Home Interactive, SEGA, SNK CORPORATION, THQ Nordic GmbH, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment and Microsoft Studios. I was wondering if you still need Xbox Live Gold membership to play these games and it seems you don’t. You can pay the $9.99 and have access to the games, but if you want to play any online multiplayer, then you’ll need an Xbox Live Gold membership for that. This is an extra $120 a year on top of your $60 a year you pay for Gold which brings that total up to $200.
If you do pay the $9.99 a month, then all games you want to play will have to be downloaded to your hard drive as they had issues with streaming them. You can download as many games as you want, but only as long as they are in the available library. If you want to purchase any of the games you play you can do so and save 20% with the discount for DLC and any add-on’s being 10%. If you cancel your Xbox Game Pass membership you will lose access to any game downloaded, but keep all achievements and progress in the game. If you have an Xbox Live Gold membership you will be able to play games before anyone else who only pays for the Xbox Game Pass. Due to some of the games in the available library being Xbox 360, we may be seeing some more additional backwards compatible games that you may have the disc for. As of right not there is no word on having this be available to Windows 10 through Play Anywhere, but it was announced today so there is room for improvement.
I know I’m an Xbox guy, but I will bring up what I brought up when this was announced by Nintendo. This doesn’t sound like a great idea and I fear that this business plan may be going in a downward direction. Being an Xbox Live Gold member already provides you with four free games a month and there’s no argument for saying that those may not be ones you want to play, because the same may hold true for the available library in Xbox Game Pass. Unless you know the schedule for upcoming games then you may be going for months with the same titles in the library, with maybe only a few you really want to play. Also, there’s no reason to get rid of your Xbox Live Gold membership and hop over to Xbox Game Pass as you are guaranteed four new titles a month. They tried this with EA Access and I’m doing just find with out it. My biggest worry is for the games that come out and when you get around to playing them, they get removed from the library. This means that you now have to buy the game before it gets removed, or find a place online to buy it at a cheaper price.