In the latest episode of GrubbSnax, games journalist Jeff Grubb said that Microsoft still plan on dropping Xbox Live Gold.
Grubb stated:
“I just wanted to reiterate, Xbox Live Gold is still on a board somewhere saying ‘this is going to go away at some point’. 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’.”
Grubb also said that this will not happen until Xbox Game Pass reaches some kind of milestone in its membership. Saying:
“[Dropping Gold] might take years, because the focus right now still very much is getting Game Pass into a very healthy position.
“It’s okay right now, but […] before E3 things were starting to kind of slow down and I think there were maybe some people at Microsoft getting a little bit antsy about it because they’re like, ‘we do need this thing to grow’, the problem is they were waiting for big games to come to the service.
“It seems that E3 really helped Game Pass hit its stride where people can now look into the future and say: ‘If I get it now I’m going to have all these games, but then there’s going to be this and this and this right in the immediate future, and then these big things on the horizon.’
“So Microsoft’s just kind of [keeping their] 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’.”
