Game Pass Friends and Family spotted: sharing goes beyond family

The family plan from Game Pass – in the testing phase since August – is back to being talked about thanks to a new sighting that allows you to have a clearer – and potentially much more interesting – picture of the situation. Recall that, according to what has emerged from the first tests so far, the new plan allows you to connect up to 4 accounts against a monthly subscription of 21.99 euros to be able to access all the benefits offered by the Ultimate Game Pass planthe most complete one.

The latest news concerns the appearance of what should be the final name of the subscription, which should be known as Game Pass – Friends & Familythus indicating the possibility of bring your friends’ accounts together under one roofas well as family ones.

If this were to be confirmed, it would be one stance by Microsoft that goes in sharp contrast with what is happening in general in the world of subscriptions. Netflix, for example, after years of incentives (before) and silence (after) has decided to intervene very clearly against the sharing of the subscription and the same has happened recently also in the case of DAZN.

In the case of Microsoft, on the other hand, the Redmond house could even push on sharing to increase the number of subscribers, in the face of much lower revenues than those generated by 4 single subscriptions. Obviously you have to look at this news with the right degree of realism and take into account immediately that this scenario is absolutely not sustainable in the long term, which is why we should not be surprised when Microsoft finds itself making the rules more restrictive that today even seem too good to be true.

On the other hand, Microsoft is a company that boasts important resources outside the gaming world that can allow it to implement such an aggressive strategy, something that the competition will hardly be able to replicate immediately. Even the recent rise of PlayStation 5, for example, lets us understand how marginal revenue is a key issue for Sony, while Microsoft can tackle the issue with much more confidence.

In addition to the renewal of the Game Pass subscription plans, it seems that Microsoft is also working on some news regarding the cloud component of the service, although in this case the details are more smoky.

The main novelty, in fact, concerns Microsoft’s renewal of the trademark rights XCLOUD, or what in the past was used to indicate the project of the Redmond house dedicated to cloud gaming. When this was integrated into the Game Pass it officially became Xbox Cloud Gamingbut the name xcloud it continued to be in use within the community for some time.

Today this is less and less widespread due to the greater adoption of the official name, however it seems that Microsoft intends to continue to maintain the rights also on the now disused brand. We don’t expect Xbox Cloud Gaming to be renamed to XCLOUD, but Microsoft may use this name for other future cloud-related projects.