Xbox LIVE

If you're one of the six people left on Earth who haven't played Skyrim yet, then Microsoft, Valve, and Bethesda have some very exciting news for you. Skyrim: Special Edition will be free to play this weekend on Xbox One and Steam, giving you the chance to dive into the cold, harsh lands of Skyrim at no initial cost. This free weekend is already underway, so you can download the game now and start playing right away.

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It's that time of the month again -- Microsoft has taken the wraps off the games that will be available under its 'Games with Gold' program. The August 2017 lineup will be comprised of four titles total, all of them for the Xbox One with two that also support the older Xbox 360 console. Availability will be staggered throughout the month, in some cases persisting through mid-September.

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While Xbox Live is a fairly feature-rich service, one important feature that has been notably absent is the ability to gift games with your friends. Xbox players have been asking for it too -for years on end at this point. It seems like those requests will soon be answered, as Xbox executive Mike Ybarra has indicated that Microsoft is close to implementing game gifting.

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This week the folks at Microsoft behind the Xbox One have released the Netflix subscription model in a game program called Xbox Game Pass. As revealed earlier this year, Xbox Game Pass allows the subscriber to access "over 100 Xbox One and Backward Compatible Xbox 360 games" for right around $10 a month. It's easy to envision a service such as this replacing the traditional one-time-cost model that's been in place since the beginning of games - save the additional barrier in-between there and here.

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Microsoft has announced Xbox Live's Games with Gold for the month of May, and Star Wars fans will want to take note. May's selection of free games includes not one but two Star Wars titles, likely as a way to celebrate Star Wars day on May 4th. If you missed out on these Star Wars games the first time around, this is a good chance to pick them up.

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If you're one of the millions of people who have a Gamertag through Xbox Live, you should know that soon they'll come with expiration dates. Starting September 15, any Gamertag that goes five years without being used will expire, re-entering the pool of available Gamertags for anyone to claim. With the Xbox brand turning 15 years old in November, something like this was bound to happen sooner or later, and now we have a date for when the policy concerning Gamertags will change.

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A tweeted suggestion led to a petition recommendation, and that petition recommendation led to a surprise announcement: Xbox Live will offer wheelchair avatars in the future, and it sounds like the feature isn't a long way off. The wheelchair avatar plans were first confirmed in a tweet by Phil Spencer, who said, “No petition needed, we hear you. This is something that we’ve already look at, not far off." A couple sample photos of the avatars were also shared.

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Xbox Live has been around for quite some time now. The service first launched in 2002 on the original Xbox. At the time, the ability to play console games online with friends and strangers was a pretty novel concept. Many people signed up for the service back then, and a large number of those accounts were never transferred over to the Xbox 360, and have sat inactive ever since. And now we're finally going to be able to use the usernames that were claimed way back then.

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Microsoft's first Xbox One update of 2016 will ramp up the console's social cred, but one of the most hotly-anticipated features will have to wait. The new update, which some gamers will see appearing on their consoles from today, will give a preview of who is in a Party game before it's actually joined, while the Gamerscore Leaderboard will show a comparison of how you're doing compared to everyone else, along with who has improved the most.

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Hot on the heels of E3 2015, Microsoft is raising the cap on the free Games with Gold games it dishes out each month to Xbox Live Gold subscribers. And to celebrate the fact that the promo is now on its 2nd year, Microsoft will be giving Live Gold members two new games to chew on each month. That means that starting July, Live Gold users have a total of four titles to try out for free, two on the Xbox One and two on the Xbox 360.

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Friday saw the arrest of an 18-year-old man in the UK for his involvement in the hackings that took down both the PlayStation and Xbox online gaming networks for several days last month starting on Christmas. The incident saw a number of headlines after the holiday, as gamers were unable to get online for an increasingly frustrating period of time, and hacking group Lizard Squad claimed responsibility. The unnamed teen was arrested by police near the city of Liverpool on suspicion of not only hacking, but also "swatting."

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Trying to get some gaming in to start your weekend? Yeah, about that: Xbox Live is down, or at least limited. We don’t have a reason for the outage/slowdown, but it’s widespread and affects every part of Xbox Live right now. If you’re experiencing problems purchasing content, or accessing social/gaming content via cloud storage, just know you’re not alone. We don’t yet know what the issue is, but it’s affecting just about everything gaming. Media like TV or music are listed as unaffected.

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