The news, the excellent news, has been confirmed. You will surely remember that we closed last week with a leak about the Xbox Game Pass family plan that Microsoft began testing in early August. A plan that, according to said rumor, would be called Friends & Family, thus indicating that, unlike what happens with a large part of subscription services of any kind, in this case the plan could also be shared with friends.
This nuance is, in fact, the most important, since what it tells us is that it is not necessary for the people who share the plan to have to reside in the same address, something that many others do require. Obviously the price of the monthly fee for the family plan, 21.99 euros in the tests that are being carried out in Ireland, is higher than that of the subscription to the individual Ultimate level (12.99 euros), but of course, it is that all the accounts that are part of it (up to five) will have the status of Ultimate. In other words, the cost per account and month would be 4.40 euros.
And I said at the beginning of the news that it is no longer a rumour, since Microsoft has published on its support website information about Xbox Game Pass Friends and Familyand among the questions to which it answers, we find the following: «I am the main account holder. Who do you think I should invite to join my group?«. What is interesting is not so much the question, whose wording invites us to think that we are facing an automatic translation, as the answer, which explicitly confirms what we have been waiting for months:
«Do you live in a household where people like to play games at the same time on multiple devices? Do you have friends and family who love to play and like to play with you, but they don’t live with you? Want to play a game from the Game Pass catalog with people who don’t have an Xbox, but would be willing to play using cloud gaming? Sharing a Friends and Family membership may be the best option for you and those you play with.»
There are, at the moment, no official dates for the expansion of this subscription modality to other countries. And it is understandable, of course, because if the individual modalities of Xbox Game Pass have already been quite successful, it is conceivable that now, with the possibility that both family members and groups of friends agree to share this new modality, their numbers could experience even greater growth.
