Xbox is abandoning the Xbox Live moniker its online services have used for ages, and will instead refer to those spaces as the Xbox network moving forward.
However, Xbox Live as a phrase won’t completely leave our vocabularies anytime soon as it is still the name of choice for Xbox’s paid online membership Xbox Live Gold.
The change was first spotted by eagle-eyed Xbox owners participating in the Xbox Preview beta program. A recent version of the Xbox dashboard featured text like “upload to the Xbox network” where it previously said “upload to Xbox Live.”
According to a statement given to The Verge, the naming shift covers Xbox’s online spaces and aims to more clearly define the line between Xbox Live Gold and other online services throughout the platform. Similarly, the Verge reports that Microsoft’s services agreement already made the Xbox Live to Xbox network shift back in August, though Microsoft denied any major plans to rebrand at the time.
Rebranding in the interest of clarity has become somewhat of a trend itself over the last year. Electronic Arts consolidated its subscription library naming schemes across platforms as a simple EA Play back in August 2020, and also dropped Origin in favor of EA Desktop. Ubisoft also changed up its services branding just recently by dropping its Uplay and Uplay+ branding in favor of a new Ubisoft Connect platform and a rebranded Ubisoft+ subscription library.