Having an Xbox 360 under your TV allows entertainment to be accessible by all the family

Having an Xbox 360 under your TV allows entertainment to be accessible by all the family. But that usually means you want an Xbox Live account for each person rather than trying to share one. It also inevitably means paying for multiple Gold accounts every year.

Microsoft eased that burden back in 2010 by introducing the Xbox Live Gold Family Pack. For $100 you got four Gold accounts that could be shared on a single console or split across multiple machines if you so wished. It offered a significant saving over the typical $40 per Gold account annual subscription. Other benefits included being able to monitor activity, restrict access for kids, and allocate Microsoft Points to each account. All invaluable features for parents.

Unfortunately, the option of a Family Pack has now disappeared all of a sudden. For some reason Microsoft has decided to stop offering it, literally overnight, and without warning. Anyone trying to sign up for a new account or renew an existing Family Pack is being denied the option, and Microsoft is so far offering no explanation as to why this decision has been taken.

Were the Family Pack accounts not popular enough? Or does this point to a big change coming to the Xbox Live system when the Xbox 720 is launched? Maybe these family controls will be built into the new Xbox Live, and maybe Microsoft has a new way it wants to handle family accounts that the old way of doing things didn’t support?