11 hours ago
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is a senior correspondent and author of Notepad, who has been covering all things Microsoft, PC, and tech for over 20 years.
Microsoft has started teasing a new Discord and Xbox Game Pass partnership, just a day after lowering prices of its Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass subscriptions. Microsoft Gaming CEO Asha Sharma says the company is partnering with Discord again “as we continue to make Game Pass more flexible for our players.”
It’s not immediately clear what the latest Discord and Xbox partnership will result in, but given it’s a Game Pass one it’s likely related to some perks for subscribers of Xbox Game Pass. At the moment Game Pass Ultimate subscribers can get a month of Discord Nitro as part of the subscription, and it’s possible that Microsoft and Discord could bundle Nitro Basic or some Nitro features as part of Game Pass.
The mysterious tease comes as Microsoft prepares to start testing these changes. “Some of you might start to see some code in the wild, and we will share more details with you all soon,” says Sharma. I reported in February that Microsoft is looking at ways to bundle third-party services with Game Pass subscriptions. Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters told The Information last month that he and Sharma had “kicked around ideas” for partnering on subscription bundles.
Microsoft and Discord first started partnering together in 2018 by linking Xbox Live profiles to Discord ones. The Xbox engineering team also worked closely with Discord to integrate voice chat into the Xbox dashboard in 2022, before improving the integration and adding the ability to stream and watch Discord streams on an Xbox console in 2024.
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