Xbox Live Gold and Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscribers have gone through a bit of a rough patch recently considering how this month’s free Games with Gold were received compared to the PlayStation Plus titles and how Xbox Game Pass games were added in recent weeks. Following those events which were largely perceived as setbacks or downgrades by subscribers, the Free Play Days games – or game, in this case – also made for an odd turn of events that hasn’t gone unnoticed by Xbox Live Gold users.
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The Free Play Days games are announced every Thursday, and this time, Xbox Live Gold and Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscribers can play I Am Fish for free throughout the weekend. To be clear, this isn’t a knock on I Am Fish – it comes from Bossa Studios, the same developer that made Surgeon Simulator and I Am Bread, it’s got positive reviews, and it’s an entertaining simulator. The problem people seem to have with this game being free-to-play for the weekend is the fact that it’s the only game that’s included in this round of Free Play Days.
If you take a look at the archives for the Free Play Days games, you’ll see a history of what’s been made temporarily free-to-play over the past couple of weeks. Those games include things like Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2, NBA 2K23, Rainbow Six Siege, and Dead by Daylight just to give an idea of the spread of games, but the one thing they’ve all got in common is that there are multiple games made free-to-try each week. Most of the time it’s three games being offered at once, and sometimes it’s two or even four, but it hasn’t been since the week of September 29th that only one game – WRC 10 FIA World Rally Championship – was the sole game in the Free Play Days lineup.
By itself, this wouldn’t be a big deal at all, but the situation’s been compounded now by people who were already asking what was going on with Xbox given the recent Xbox Game Pass and Xbox Games with Gold situations. It also didn’t go unnoticed by Xbox fans that a Bossa Studios developer was the one who suggested late last year that the Xbox Series S was holding back the development of games. Again, that part wouldn’t really matter under normal circumstances, but when I Am Fish is the only game that’s free-to-try this week, it’s the game that gets singled out.
A new round of Free Play Days games will be offered next week, too, so we’ll see then how many are offered and what those games will be.
