With the recent crop of Xbox 360 games being recycled in the Games with Gold program a lot of questions were being asked of where it was going and Xbox finally confirmed that from October there will no longer be 360 games as part of the bundle. The full details of the email sent to subscribers is below:

Hello,

From 1 October 2022, the monthly games provided to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and Xbox Live Gold members via Games with Gold will no longer include Xbox 360 titles.

We have reached the limit of our ability to bring Xbox 360 games to the catalogue; however, Games with Gold will continue to include exciting Xbox One titles and exclusive savings each month.

This will not impact any Xbox 360 games that you downloaded before October 2022. Any Xbox 360 titles that you redeem via Games with Gold before that time are yours to keep on your Xbox account, regardless of whether you continue your subscription.

Thank you for being a loyal member.

Team Xbox

With the announced end of 360 games being bundled I’m hoping that Xbox might close it out with a few big games, even if they are repeats. A “best of Xbox 360” would be a good way to remind people of just how many amazing games were part of that era of Xbox before the change is made. Over the years a number of big franchises from 360 had been included in the program, such as:

• The Assassin’s Creed series
• Games from the Castlevania franchise
• The Dead Space Trilogy
• Lego, including Star Wars, Indiana Jones and Batman
• Star Wars, including the original Xbox Battlefront games and The Force Unleashed

Many publishers would have used this as a means to get players interested in earlier games in new franchise releases. I wouldn’t have tried Dark Souls if not for the 360 version being part of the program. And though that game wasn’t for me I bet it did bring in a lot more players and increase excitement for the sequels on Xbox.

The big question from this is going to be “what are we getting after that?” – will it still be four games a month or will it just be two Xbox One/Series titles from that point onwards? I’m thinking that this will be the start of another push to get the remaing Gold subscribers over to Game Pass again. If they leveraged Game Pass perks and included games to own, not just DLC, it might be enough to get a few more players to switch and provide even more value to the Game Pass Ultimate plan too. And with a family plan possibly on the way, we could see a lot more changes coming too as Xbox tries to further streamline their subscriptions. As always, time will tell. 🙂