Microsoft drops XBL requirement for F2P MP games

Huh! That's awfully nice of them.

Today, we are sharing more details on our plans to make online multiplayer in free-to-play games available on Xbox without an Xbox Live Gold membership. As part of listening to your feedback, this change will take place starting today, and all Xbox players will be able to access online multiplayer at no charge for a library of over 50 free-to-play games that support online multiplayer.

The full list of more than 50 free-to-play games is available on Xbox.com and below; the Xbox.com list will be updated as more free-to-play games launch. For more information about these changes and your Xbox membership options, please visit our FAQ.

• 3on3 FreeStyle
• Aegis Wing
• APB Reloaded
• Apex Legends
• Armored Warfare
• Battle Islands: Commanders
• Bless Unleashed
• Brawlhalla
• Call of Duty: Warzone
• Crackdown
• Crackdown 2
• Crimson Alliance
• Crossout
• CRSED: F.O.A.D.
• Darwin Project
• Dauntless
• DC Universe Online
• Dead or Alive 5 Last Round: Core Fighters
• Dead or Alive 6: Core Fighters
• Defiance 2050
• Destiny 2
• Doritos Crash Course
• Dungeon Defenders II
• Enlisted
• Eternal Card Game
• Family Game Night
• Fishing Planet
• Fortnite
• Galaxy Control: Arena
• Happy Wars
• Harm’s Way
• Hawken
• Hyper Scape
• Killer Instinct
• Korgan
• Minion Masters
• Neverwinter
• Outriders (Demo)
• Paladins
• Path of Exile
• Phantasy Star Online 2
• Phantom Dust
• Pinball FX2
• Prominence Poker
• Realm Royale
• Rec Room
• Resident Evil Revelations 2
• ROBLOX
• Rocket League
• Rogue Company
• Skyforge
• SMITE
• Spacelords
• Spellbreak
• Star Trek Online
• Techwars Global Conflict
• TERA
• The Four Kings Casino and Slots
• Too Human
• Trove
• Vigor
• War Thunder
• Warface
• Warframe
• World of Tanks
• World of Warships: Legends
• Yaris

Editor’s Note (4/21/21): We’ve removed Battle Ages, Battle Islands, and Gems of War from the list because they do not support Online Multiplayer. These games are still free to play without an Xbox Live Gold membership.

Obviously, the big ones here are stuff like Apex Legends, Warzone, and Warframe, but there are a ton of other games affected. I'm curious if this actually impacts Xbox's revenues all that much or if people who already play a bunch of F2P games are also likely to play stuff like COD MP as well?

The most shocking thing I've learned from this is that apparently APB: All Points Bulletin is still running?

@imhungry: What about Yaris? The game has literally outlasted the car after which it was named! And it's a horrible game.

Also it's a nice reminder that Too Human is just permanently free. So are Crackdown 1 and 2?

@imhungry said:

Yeah, that's fucking crazy. Would love to see what that game looks like now.

I remember the initial trailer/hype being wild and the game being a complete disappointment.

Just in time for me to not be able to play Warzone because of server queues haha. Great news and it just makes sense. Also that new war zone map is not new at all but it's still cool and that game is great so you should all hop in

That's good to hear!

This is pretty smart of Microsoft because on the surface this feels like they are giving something away, an act of kindness and goodwill on their part, but in reality they are just correcting something that should have been the status quo from day one and they've been willfully abusing for years.

Still it's good that competition has forced them to make all these moves that actually favor the consumer for once, and I think the brand is better for it.

@humanity: I don't think it's actually kindness or goodwill or competition. I think they realized that the profit from Vbux and other micros is just more than whatever they could get out of keeping the Gold requirement.

They are moving away from Gold in general because they want everyone on Game Pass Ultimate. Games With Gold have been horrible for months and I think they probably don't have as many people left who subscribe to Gold but not to Game Pass Ultimate. Since the appeal of Game Pass is not online multiplayer my guess is that they crunched the numbers and said that they wouldn't lose Game Pass subscribers by loosening the requirements and they don't really want Gold only subscribers anyway, so if the microtransaction cut profits are greater than the advantage of keeping people subscribed to Gold it just makes sense to drop the requirement.

@bigsocrates: I don't think they are moving away from Gold anytime soon as the whole kerfuffle that ultimately led to the announcement of Free-to-play games no longer being locked behind Gold was their announcement of increasing the price for Gold in the first place. One might argue that increasing the price for Gold was some convoluted strategy to make people realize that it's not worth just having Gold alone when they can pay a little more for Game Pass and have both but that seems like a really bad strategy as, evidently, the general pushback was quite strong. They are in a palce to know better than to pressure consumers as they're waging a very calculated war of attrition with Sony at the moment, using goodwill and services as their primary ammunition.

Also Gold is still a good cheap alternative for people that don't want to make use of Game Pass. I'm sure they would want everyone to merge but I also can easily see another huge backlash if they announced that Gold is going away and the only way you can play online games is to also subscribe to a service some might not be interested in. Tiered pricing is important and Microsoft knows this. They were also going to get their Vbux cut because if you're on Xbox then you just got Gold to play Fortnite and that was the end of it. People have long ago accepted that online gaming is locked behind that paywall on that platform.

@humanity: I think that increasing the price of Gold was pretty transparently a move to get more people on to Game Pass because it made Gold a horrible deal in comparison. At $120 a year vs $180 a year there's just not much value there. It did backfire pretty spectacularly so they're not going to do it, and I don't know how long they will stick to the tiered pricing model, it could be for a very long time depending on Game Pass adoption, but raising the price of Gold without raising the price of Ultimate clearly undermined the tiered pricing model.

I don't think Gold is a very good "cheap" alternative in the current market. PlayStation Plus offers all the same benefits plus a far better selection of games. Nintendo Online is much cheaper. Gold definitely makes sense for some consumers who don't want Game Pass, so I totally understand why some people still subscribe to it, but it's the worst comparable product on the market and I think Microsoft knows that.

I don't think that you're right about Vbux and other micros. There has always been a large part of the Xbox owning population who don't subscribe to Gold, and many of them are more casual gamers who might mess with free to play games. There are also people who own Xboxes (possibly from years ago) and may play Fortnite or another F2P game but just don't do so on their Xbox because they don't want to pay for Gold. They might be willing to dip in on Xbox if it's free. I think there's a pretty big market of more casual Xbox users that Microsoft wants to tap into.

On the flip side I doubt there are many people who own Xboxes and have Gold JUST for the F2P games (as in people who will now cancel their Gold subscriptions because they can play Fortnite on their Xbox.) Most of those people are playing on other platforms.

I'm not really sure what positive this does for them on the flip side. It might get a little bit of generic good will from people who don't really care about Xbox that much but I don't know what that's worth.

Honestly I could see Microsoft doing away with Gold altogether at some point. Maybe not in the immediate future but at some point. If they are as all in on Gamepass as they seem to be then having actual free online multiplayer would be a great inducement to get people into the Xbox ecosystem and then try to sell them Game Pass. I doubt there's a hard plan in place right now to do that because Gold is still a money maker (though if current estimates of 23 million Game Pass subscribers are correct we may be nearing a tipping point where there are more Game Pass users than Gold users) and they'd have to come up some other tier (maybe higher streaming fidelity like Netflix uses?) but I could imagine it happening. This might be them dipping a toe into that water to see what it actually does to their service numbers and how people react.

@bigsocrates: I don’t think you’re right in that it was a transparent move to get people to move away from Gold. Microsoft has gone on record that they are planning to continue Gold well into the future and that it is an important part of their brand. It was a miscalculation on their part in that a lot of services have increased pricing over the years and Gold has comparatively remained the same. I can only imagine the disastrous optics of the situation if what you’re speculating is actually the case and thousands of people resubscribed to Gold at a higher price only to see the service discontinued a year later.

I also don’t think you are correct in your comparison to both Nintendo and Sony products as they are somewhat irrelevant to someone in the Xbox ecosystem. The Nintendo offering is much cheaper but the service itself is a lot worse to the point where you need an external phone app to use chat in games that even support it. Making the comparison to Nintendo seems like a huge stretch and is largely inconsequential to Microsoft’s strategy and consumer expectations. As to what service offers a better package that is entirely subjective. I was a PS Plus subscriber for years and thought 90% of the games they added each month didn’t interest me at all. I paid like many others do to keep playing online. Mileage may vary but obviously if you don’t care about Sony games then you’re not going to care much about PS Plus either.

Interesting ideas though.

@humanity: Companies constantly reassure everyone that they are going to continue a service far into the future, right until they're ready to announce that they're not. I don't think the plan was ever to pull the plug on Gold this year or anything, but to do what they could to move people off it. It's important to note how they raised the price. They actually stopped offering 12 month subscriptions and the discount that came with that rather than raising prices significantly on month to month subscribers (I think it was only a $1 raise on those.) Everyone was being pushed into shorter subscriptions and more frequent billing, which makes people more frequently consider what they're spending and have more chances to think "Well maybe Game Pass is the better deal here." As for any concern about people being bitter because they subscribed for a long period and the service is being cancelled, the shorter subscription period resolves that too. You announce the end of the program 6 months to a year out, nobody is subscribed for longer than that anyway, and if people are then you refund them. You're not going to get a lot of people who are angry because you're no longer charging them for multiplayer.

It's flat out wrong to say that PlayStation Plus and Xbox Gold are not in competition and influential on one another. Both companies have directly copied the other. PlayStation charging for online multiplayer was copying Microsoft, and Games With Gold was copying PlayStation Plus. Microsoft would never have added Games With Gold if they weren't worried about PlayStation Plus making the PlayStation a more appealing option than the Xbox.

Sony has clearly upped the quality of PS+ games recently to compete with Game Pass. Meanwhile Microsoft has not made any countermove and is happy to offer bad games with Games With Gold because they don't want people using that service as an alternative to Game Pass. Before Game Pass became a big deal the two services were much more comparable.

Nintendo is more complicated, because they're off on their own island, but the fact that Nintendo Online is so cheap does help make the Switch more attractive to parents and especially families who can use a family plan.

Microsoft has done a lot to make all its products more appealing in the last few years. Whether it's backwards compatibility, launching the 9th gen with 2 SKUs to include a low priced option or offering Game Pass they're really working to offer value as a way of bringing in customers when their two biggest rivals have much better software offerings. The fact that the Gold price increase is basically the only thing they've tried to do that cuts the other way and cuts that way hard tells you something about how they view that program right now. It's a legacy product and clearly not a priority. For what it would look like if it were a priority all you need to look at is PlayStation Plus, which seems to be testing out a video component in some territories as an added value, in addition to adding a big collection of PS4 classics for PS5 users, exclusive PS5 games that have often be free at launch, and other benefits.

I guess I'm going to jump back into PSO2 to prepare for New Genesis...