love story unfolding!

Aaah, so THAT is what Microsoft is after.  Very clever.  Microsoft wants to pull users from other platforms into the Microsoft ecosystem.

NOW we know why Microsoft changed their policy.  Let's go back to earlier this generation:

"Microsoft is not allowing cross-play completely; which means [War Thunder] cannot be on Xbox One."  -- Gaijin Entertainment's CEO Anton Yudintsev

They didn't want to do it until they were in a position to gain a real benefit from it and now they act like the good guys.  That's pretty amusing.

I believe we've had the discussion about 'subscription-parity' before. Anyway, since it's already free on PC and changing that is practically impossible thanks to Steam, the only remaining option is to make it free on Xbox, just like you said. Considering how many Gold users (most of them probably quite happy) there are and how much money MS is making from them, do you think MS is going to do anything about it? Of course not. The lesser evil is to simply combine free and paid members into one userbase.

Personally, I loathe paid multiplayer when it's clearly not required for operating the online infrastructure. But people keep paying for it happily, so the companies keep charging for it.

Sure with PC, but not with a competitors console. Buy our competitors console and you an play our game for free, buy our console and you must pay us to play our game.

It's kind of worse imo when it's another console. You're giving a better service(free) to people that buy someone elses console over your own, all be it for one game at the moment.

And that's why Sony won't allow, which makes more sense to me.  MS could easily do this without demanding people sign up for XBL, but they want that info and a boost to MAU after Sony made them out to be liars with that whole "largest gaming network."

The only thing they're getting is multiplayer in one game though. I wouldn't expect there to be enough cross-platform games using XBL to make Switch users pay for XBL too. And in addition to all the games, you get even more for your XBL subscription.

If you still have a problem, go file your complaints with MS. Of course you'd probably have to file your complaint with your wallet if you wanted it to count, but if you're paying for XBL, you're one of the people supporting the current situation. If you continue paying, you must obviously consider the lesser evil to be paying and playing instead not paying and not playing.

Like I said, I loathe paid multiplayer in most cases. In addition, I also vote with my wallet (which, to be frank, isn't difficult for me, because I don't enjoy online multiplayer on consoles very much).

I don't own an xbox, I'm not saying that Switch users should pay, I'm saying that imo I think games that have cross-platform with other consoles should be free on xbox too.

Trojan horse?

Trojan horse.

Can't really agree. It's either all games or no games that should be free unless there's a something really special about the game's multiplayer. Consistency is often the key, and I think it's the key in this case as well.