
is $60 total, making the price essentially the same). Otherwise, these levels feel illogical with the obvious goal of getting as many people into Ultimate as possible because there’s no point in buying the Core and the console separately (although a year’s Core can be obtained for half the price). It seems like Core shouldn’t exist at all, and while online only has been rolled into consoles, Ultimate is still attractive with other bonuses, people want that. While this has always been a problem with Gold’s existence, it’s becoming even more visible now that they’re all under one Game Pass banner. The only way to get both is to buy Ultimate, which may come with extras like PC, Cloud, and EA Play that you don’t care about. but if you Only Buy Core (formerly Gold), you get online multiplayer, but not full game pass.

You can see the odd man out here, which is the Game Pass console, the only list that doesn’t come with the ability to play online after all this time. Xbox Game Pass Ultimate ($17) – It has online multiplayer, all Game Pass games on console, PC and cloud, EA Play membership.Xbox Game Pass PC ($10) – Has online multiplayer (because you never needed Gold for PC), all are Game Pass games on PC.


When I heard that Xbox Live Gold was ending on Monday, my first thought was “finally.” At this point the concept was starting to feel outdated, and it made sense for Microsoft to consolidate everything under the Game Pass label.
