Microsoft Xbox

Even many months after its debut, finding an Xbox Series X|S is not particularly easy. Even though they are sporadically restocked at a number of retailers, they tend to be bought out very quickly, even if the stock is in the form of a very expensive bundle. Making matters worse is the way restocks often occur without much notice, so a lot of people don’t even know stock was available until it is sold out again.

It’s never a good thing when hotly anticipated products have issues right around their release dates. Unfortunately, such is the situation for the Xbox Series X right now. Many players, having just gotten their hands on the brand-new console from Microsoft, have reported issues with the disk drive. Of course, this has been a point of much dissatisfaction: after all, one of the reasons the Xbox Series X is $200 more expensive than the Series S is because it has a disk drive while the S version does not. So needless to say, people who bought the Series X specifically for its disk drive are displeased with this problem if they have it.

Some serious changes are being made to Xbox Live Gold’s subscription program, as Microsoft has decided to discontinue their year-long subscription plans. As of now, only monthly and three-month Xbox Live Gold subscriptions are available from Microsoft's website. Unfortunately, this was not an accidental change, and Microsoft definitely intended to make it happen, for reasons they extrapolated on to some extent.

It has been quite widely reported prior to now that Microsoft is planning to release a second next-generation Xbox that is supposed to be a less powerful version that lacks a physical media drive. But another report has revealed that this may not actually be the case. Tom Warren of The Verge, who has accurately reported on unannounced Microsoft products in the past, has claimed that the CPU for the cheaper and supposedly inferior version of the next-gen Xbox will have "the same speed as the Series X." That said, Warren did confirm that this cheaper console will have a different GPU frequency and CU count.

With E3 being one of, if not the biggest game show every year, it was a huge letdown to learn that it was going to be canceled for 2020. Of course, with the whole COVID-19 outbreak, it was absolutely the right call, unfortunate though it may have been. Of course, E3 was a big chance for Microsoft to showcase all the new Xbox related goodies, so in the absence of that opportunity, they’ve settled on digital events, similar to Nintendo Direct videos. They’re calling this video series Xbox 20/20. These monthly videos will lead up to the holidays, when the Xbox Series X is to release.

Game Pass is constantly adding new games to its repertoire, though some get removed every once in a while. As for May though, Game Pass is getting a pretty solid number of games added to the list, with both Red Dead Redemption 2 and DayZ already available.

Microsoft has finally revealed a bit more information on the titles being added to Xbox Game Pass for the month of March, late as it may be. The good news is, there are some seriously good games up for grabs for Game Pass owners. However, as is typical by now, the Xbox and PC lineups for Game Pass vary just a bit. Not all games are available on all platforms, so it is understandable why this is the case. Some of the games we are about to mention are only available on one platform or the other.

Every month, Xbox players that have Xbox Live Gold get free games. It’s a pretty sweet deal, especially considering that subscribers often get four games, two being Xbox One titles and two being older Xbox 360 or original Xbox titles. The following are the games available for Xbox Live Gold subscribers in March.