Xbox 360 owners can rejoice at the announcement that their Xbox Live Gold membership carries over to the Xbox One, And with the of the discontinuation of the Family Gold membership, Microsoft announces a very nifty addition to Xbox Live on their new console.
Promising to be more flexible and streamlined, Phil Harrison from Microsoft says that “if you have an Xbox Gold membership today for 360 and you buy an Xbox One, your membership applies to both systems” Which makes sense, people don’t want to fork out more money for a new subscription.
Also, multiple members of a household will be able to share a single Gold account, “Anybody who has usage privilege on that machine can use it.” which indicates that the system could be similar to the Family Pack method of assigning Xbox Live Gold to additional accounts. Along with the family aspect, Harrison described a way for father and son to have individual accounts while sharing the same Xbox live Gold account. “We want you to log in to get your stuff, and when he logs in to get his stuff on that console, if you have Gold, he can use Gold as well”. Individual users will have access to their own friends lists and other personlisations, maybe referring to gamertag, profile settings?
Microsoft is still working out the specifics of how players follow and befriend each other. One-way relationships may be part of Xbox Live’s friends architecture, “something that’s under development right now,” and that Microsoft is working to determine “who your true two-way relationship friends are” Xbox One will hopefully introduce a new Follow and Friend system, following the announcement of the friends list increase to 1000, ten times more than the 360.
Microsoft will soon reveal more information about its Gold membership for the Xbox One, hopefully sometime this year. This is great news, especially for families who have to buy memberships for individual accounts, although the pricing still looks to be the same.