I don't know why they just don't try with GWG. Why not try and compete with all 3 tiers of PS+? They already have Gamepass to compete with PS Plus Extra and Gamepass Ultimate to compete with PS Plus Premium, so why not just try to compete with PS Plus Essential as well? If Sony can manage to pay for 3 decent-good games per month for PS Plus Essential with a larger subscriber base of 47.4m, then surely Xbox can afford 2 good games per month on a smaller subscriber base of probably 30-35m on Gold (less subscribers = less downloads = less money Xbox needs to compensate the publisher with).
I hear the excuse, "Gamepass is the focus these days, not Gold", but that is exactly that, an excuse. That is Xbox trying to have their cake and eat it too. You don't get to neglect your larger subscriber base service (Gold) just to grow you smaller subscriber base service (Gamepass), and then use the excuse that you need the revenue of Gold while neglecting Gold. If you have a service that you are charging people for, you need to be supporting it properly, especially since the only thing it offers other than 2 free monthly games is multiplayer play, which is free for Xbox players on PC but costs money for Xbox players on console, those 2 free games per month had better be good to make up for forcing console gamers to pay for something the PC gamers don't have to pay for.
If Xbox is worried about the marketing of Gold taking away from the marketing of Gamepass, why not just take a page from Sony's book and rebrand Gold into a new tier of Gamepass called Gamepass Basic or something that is just multiplayer and 2 free good games per month? That way Xbox just needs to market Gamepass, not Gamepass and Gold. It would take nothing away from current Gamepass subscribers as being the next tier up in this new system, current Gamepass subs would get those 2 free games per month as well and the multiplayer as well.
One thing is for sure, things can't keep going like this. They have regularly been attacked by their own fans for 2 or 3 years now as GWG offerings have continually gotten worse, and things have really came to a head now that they dropped from 4 to 2 games and the quality still isn't there. They need to make a choice, either scrap Gold and take the revenue hit until Gamepass grows enough to make up for it, or they need to actually try to make Gold a viable offering for it's current price, or they need to cut Gold's price considerably to a level that is fair for the low quality of monthly free games.
Last edited by shikamaru317 - on 28 October 2022
at most, there will be 1 or 2 "big" announcements at his events, but mainly just fluff. 
