Xbox Live Gold does not need a price change. It just needs to disappear.

Microsoft had a good Friday.

The fun started when the Xbox maker shared the news that Xbox Live Gold, a paid subscription service that exists primarily to allow Xbox users to play their games online, will soon cost more. About double.

The details varied based on the length of the subscription, but the previous $ 60 annual subscription was set to jump to $ 120 for new subscribers (existing subscribers could keep the original price). I am discussing all this in the past tense because the pullback over the course of Friday caused a change in attitude from Microsoft.

During the Friday / Saturday night, Microsoft released a couple of tweets reversing its decision and taking the additional step of allowing free online games to work without a Gold subscription. (Previously, you would still need a subscription to play an otherwise free game like Fortnite on Xbox.)

It was a commendably quick setback, and Microsoft acknowledged early on in the blog post with a tweet link that “we were wrong today and you were right to let us know.” Raising the price of Xbox Live Gold was a bad idea. But that does not mean that the subscription should be maintained.

There was a time, about a decade ago, when Xbox Live Gold made sense. Many games weren’t as online back then as they are now, “free-to-play” as we know wasn’t really a thing yet, and the price / performance gap between console and PC games was still intimidating. width.

So yes, you can play the latest Call of Duty online at no additional cost if you play on a computer. But a $ 400 console plus a $ 60 annual subscription cost a lot less than the $ 1,000 you’d have to spend on a gaming-capable PC.

Things have changed in the last 10 years. Broadband access in the home is more common and speeds are significantly faster. Console games have been “caught up” to a great extent, in the sense that the games look and work almost as well as they do on an average gaming PC.

In all that time, Xbox Live Gold has endured as a pain point for console gamers using Xbox. It’s still free to play PC games online and even use specific Xbox Live features, like group chat. But doing any of those things on Xbox requires that Gold subscription.

Inequality has started to seem especially apparent as the concept of free games has taken hold. Fortnite is perhaps the most obvious example, a game that is supposed to be free but cannot be played on Xbox without a Gold subscription. The recent news that the next Infinite Halo It’s taking a free-to-play approach also made people complain again about Gold’s continued existence.

Then there’s Xbox Game Pass, Microsoft’s Netflix-like subscription that gives users unrestricted access to a huge library of games. It comes in a few different flavors, with separate subscriptions for console and PC. However, the one Microsoft would like everyone to sign up for is Game Pass Ultimate, which combines the other two subscriptions into one and at the same time adds the benefits of a Gold subscription, for an annual cost of $ 180.

For comparison, individual PC or console subscriptions cost $ 120 per year each. So for an extra $ 60, you get the library of games on both platforms, as well as online play for your Xbox through Gold benefits. By raising the price of standalone Gold subscriptions, Microsoft was implicitly pushing users toward Game Pass Ultimate. Why pay more for the same thing when you could pay more overall but less on the deal for several different things?

That didn’t work out at all, hence Microsoft’s rollback. But the fact is, Xbox Live Gold is still hanging around like an old-time relic of console games. Both Microsoft and Sony still charge gamers for the ability to play their games online. Both companies add value to their respective subscriptions with monthly free game offers, but the main benefit for most is online gaming.

It is justifiable up to a point. Consoles function like Apple’s walled gardens in the mobile space; They are autonomous machines that are specifically designed for gaming, but that means you are playing by their rules and on their infrastructure. That infrastructure costs money, and the world’s Xbox Live Gold (or PlayStation Plus) subscriptions are what pays for it.

Even if that’s still the case in 2021, it’s not like Microsoft and Sony are here breaking down the numbers on why they still need to charge users to play online – it’s a tough case to make when all the same games can be played. in a house. computer without the need for an additional subscription fee. That’s the challenge Microsoft faces here: The company raised the price of a subscription that many already see as little more than a necessary headache.

That wasn’t going to fix anything, and it didn’t. Instead, the backlash opened Microsoft’s eyes to the root of the problems many have with Gold. Not that the company was unaware. But the immediate negative response to Friday’s news was strong enough that Microsoft was finally forced to act. Not only was the ill-advised price increase lowered, but free games will soon work without a Gold subscription, one of the biggest pain points in console games.

I’m not a businessman, but I guess this is just the beginning of an eventual Xbox Live Gold phase-out. That eventual move will likely be accompanied by a price increase for Game Pass, but that’s a much easier case to make given the ever-growing library of games, including all EA Play titles, and the fact that the price of the subscription has not changed since then. its launch in 2019.

If you’d like to hear more about this whole topic from business-minded people, my dear friends and colleagues Amanda Farough and Mike Futter discussed Microsoft’s likely future plans for Gold and Game Pass during the summer of 2020.