What is the difference between Xbox Game Pass and Xbox Live Gold?

With the recent official acquisition of the Zenimax group and the arrival of 20 Bethesda games on Xbox Game Pass, Microsoft has once again reiterated the centrality of the subscription service within its commercial strategy to be implemented for the new generation of consoles. .

Although it was born a few years ago and has evolved to welcome tens of millions of subscriber players, there are still many people who harbor a bit of confusion regarding the nature of Xbox Game Pass, especially by virtue of its coexistence with another subscription service available within the Microsoft ecosystem: Xbox Live Gold. The first thing to point out is that these two services coexist, but neither of them replaces the other: they are in fact two services dedicated to two very different aspects of the user experience with the environment and the Xbox ecosystem. Let's go and see what are the differences between the two.

Xbox Game Pass

Xbox Game Pass is instead a completely different service: to describe it in a few words, it could be defined as a service "a la Netflix", a huge catalog of video games (instead of films and TV series) that can be downloaded and played freely as long as you are subscribed to the service, thus allowing you to save on the purchase cost of individual games at the price of one subscription only. Xbox Game Pass is currently available in three different versions:

Xbox Game Pass - the basic version of the service, available on Xbox One, Xbox One X, Xbox Series S and Xbox Series X Xbox Game Pass PC - the PC version of the service: contains a slightly different catalog compared to the console counterpart Xbox Game Pass Ultimate - this version of the service combines the previous two, and also includes Xbox Live Gold within its cost, creating a sort of 3 in 1. Moreover, Xbox Game Pass Ultimate also includes access to the EA Play catalog on Xbox and PC.

Xbox Live Gold

Xbox Live Gold is nothing more than the equivalent of PlayStation Plus, which is a subscription service required to be able to play online multiplayer on Xbox family consoles: Xbox 360, Xbox One, Xbox One X, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S. By subscribing to this service you will then be able to join your friends, or other unknown players, in online multiplayer games, and you will be able to download and play freely the titles that are made available every month free to all subscribers to the service - remember, however, that once your subscription has expired, you will no longer be able to access these free games, at least until you activate a new subscription.