Xbox Live Gold Family Pack no longer available

[Funky Jammer]

Posted an hour ago.

Source: Gamer Syndrome

Microsoft has confirmed that the Xbox Live Gold Family Pack is no longer available for purchase, after several people noted its disappearance earlier this month.

“The Family Gold offer is no longer available for purchase,” a company representative told Joystiq. “The Family Center experience with settings management, allowance granting, child activity reports and family subscriptions management are still available for current Family Gold members at this time.”

Asked about the reasoning behind this decision, he replied: “We continually evaluate our business focus and work to offer services that make the most sense for our customers and Xbox.”

The Family pack was originally introduced in November 2010 and was a $99 bundle that included four year long Gold memberships for four family members, along with functions to monitor and control each family member’s content purchasing and viewing settings via the Family center.

The Xbox LIVE Gold Family Pack gives you four 12-month Gold memberships for less than the price of two. You can easily convert an existing Xbox LIVE Gold membership, or you can sign up for a new Xbox LIVE account and Gold Family Pack membership.

Note You will get a discount on your Gold Family Pack membership if you have time remaining on your existing Gold membership.

With the Gold Family Pack, you can:

Give family members an allowance of Microsoft Points to redeem for films, games and more.
Manage your family memberships, activities and Family Settings from the Family Centre.
Sign in to Xbox.com and view your family’s activity on Xbox LIVE.

 

[Jessi]

So you can still get the Gold memberships in general, right? You just can't get the discount of buying the family pack variety any more?

I can't see how they would be losing -that- much by offering a discount for buying a larger package, but they have access to their numbers, of course, and I don't, so what do I know?

 

[Funky Jammer]

Yes, regular gold is still for sale; just family gone. Besides it being a good deal for its worth, it's no use to me so I have no effect. It must've not of sold very well.

 

[RainbowFlwrPowr]

Interesting.

 

[Jessi]

Yes, regular gold is still for sale; just family gone. Besides it being a good deal for its worth, it's no use to me so I have no effect. It must've not of sold very well.

Or maybe it sold too well? If it was that much cheaper to buy it in a family pack instead of individually, then I can see them wanting to recover some of that cost.

Can those be used on more than one account? Or sold off, for example?

 

[Lost Cause]

I would hate to see if that if the individual accounts could be sold to others was the reason that the program was dropped. It might have been the lack of people actually buying the pack. How many people would buy members of the family a Xbox Live account, mostly it would have been just one or two accounts. One for the person that games and the other for the rest of the family to watch Netflix and other things non-gaming.

 

[soughtseven1035]

Is there any way that people can give these memberships to friends or something? I bet you that is what was happening and now they are getting rid of it. At least that or something very similar. I think another reason might be is because all people need is one membership most of the time. They can just log in to a certain user and have gold. There is usually only one Xbox in the house, so it would be a waste to get 4 memberships. Those are my thoughts.

 

[Dlow128]

True, more than likely people were probably taking advantage and bill doesn't like loosing money