Microsoft Dropping Xbox Live Gold Requirement for Free-To-Play Games

Microsoft has announced that they are dropping the Xbox Live Gold subscription requirements for playing online multiplayer in free-to-play games. Additionally, the Party Chat and Looking 4 Group features will also no longer need a subscription. These changes are already available as of today for those in the Xbox Insider program, which lets users try out future console updates while they are still being tested. The new features will eventually roll out to all Xbox users, but Microsoft has not yet announced when that will happen.

Microsoft has alluded to dropping the Xbox Live Gold requirement for free-to-play games before. In January the company announced plans to double the price of the subscription, but rolled back on the proposal after a vocal backlash. As part of the statement walking back the price hike, this change for free-to-play multiplayer was mentioned, but wasn’t given an exact date.

Other changes being made in this console update are a fix to an issue where some users could not enable HDR, and an update to the language options to make them more consistent across the whole console. It was also stated that some games may not currently allow free-to-play multiplayer without a subscription, but this is an issue that is being worked on.

What do you think about free-to-play games dropping the Xbox Live Gold requirement? Do you want to try some now that a subscription isn’t needed? Let us know in the comments.