Xbox Multiplayer and 10 Games Are Free for the Weekend

Microsoft is giving Xbox One owners a chance to play multiplayer games for free from August 6th to August 10th without requiring an Xbox Live Gold subscription. A total of 10 games including popular picks like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and Xbox's own Gears 5 are being unlocked over the next four days to give everyone a chance to play. The timing of this "Big Gaming Weekend" event noticeably coincided with Sony's own free weekend for PlayStation Plus, so if you've got both consoles, you can play a lot of multiplayer games for free this weekend.

The Big Gaming Weekend full of free multiplayer gaming was announced on Wednesday by Microsoft. Many people who have Xbox consoles probably already have an Xbox Live Gold subscription anyway, but for those who don't you won't need one at all to play multiplayer games this weekend. If it's got multiplayer and requires a subscription, you can play for free for the next four days.

That's not a bad deal at all, but it's one we've seen before and is effectively a free trial of the online service. Where the Big Gaming Weekend event gets even better is through its selection of unlocked games players can download. Ten different multiplayer-focused games are unlocked for the weekend to let players play through them as much as they can before the Big Gaming Weekend event ends, and since Xbox multiplayer is free during the same timeframe, you can bring all your friends.

The full list of unlocked games for the weekend can be found below. All of them are available on Xbox One consoles while some of them are also available on PC.

Xbox's Big Gaming Weekend Unlocked Games

• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (multiplayer only, starts August 7th)
• Gears 5 (also on PC)
• Black Desert
• Dragon Ball FighterZ
• Monster Hunter World
• Elder Scrolls Online: Tamriel Unlimited
• Borderlands 3 (ends August 9th)
• Subnautica (also on PC)
• Naruto to Boruto: Shinobi Striker
• Ark: Survival Evolved (also on PC)

While this weekend event's timing isn't a coincidence alongside PlayStation's free weekend, there's already been speculation that this is some sort of test for future Xbox Live Gold changes. Microsoft has shot down rumors about the Xbox Live Gold system changing, however, after it was rumored Xbox Live Gold would soon be free. We've seen these sorts of free weekends in the past as well, though the 10 unlocked games is a nice bonus we don't usually see.

Xbox's Big Gaming Weekend with its unlocked games starts on August 6th and will continue until August 10th.