After a decade of doling out free video games to Xbox Live Gold subscribers, now we come to the end. Xbox Live Games with Gold closes up shop in September. Henceforth it will be known as Xbox Game Pass Core, which still gives subscribers multiplayer access (and a library of titles) but it ends Microsoft’s 10-year campaign of searching out, dredging up, and strong-arming games publishers into handing over a title or two each month.
So here, for August, for the last time, are the last free video games all you ungrateful complaining Xbox Live subscribers will get.
- Blue Fire ($19.99 ERP)
- Inertial Drift ($19.99 ERP)
Both are available Aug. 1 to Aug. 31.
Speaking as Polygon’s custodian and memorializer keeping an eternal vigil over the free games offered by Xbox and its competitors since 2014, now I deliver the canonical and encyclical ranking of the five greatest games that Xbox Live Games with Gold gave to the world from 2013 to 2023. Please press play on the YouTube video below while you read and remember them:
Hail and farewell, Xbox Live Games with Gold.