Xbox's Games With Gold have been a little lacklustre as of late but this month is a little better than most. We hoped that August would be the month Games With Gold would make a comeback and, while it hasn't done that, it is still a solid month.
Latest - The Reveal
We finally saw the reveal tweet and the games you can expect to see are Darksider 3, Yooka Laylee, Lost Planet 3 and Garou: Mark of the Wolves.
That's not a bad list of games.
When Do We Find Out What Games We're Getting?
Xbox's Major Nelson is who you want to be following if you want the August 2021 Games With Gold announcement from the source. For some reason, he's the man who shares the news with everyone else at the end of the month.
If you check Major Nelson's Twitter account at around 08:00 PST / 11:00 EST / 16:00 BST on the last Tuesday / Wednesday of the month, you should find yourself a Games With Gold announcement. This month's Games With Gold Announcement is due on July 27th / 28th
Major Nelson always gets a lot of flak for the announcements, especially if they're bad, but he is as synonymous with the Xbox brand as Master Chief at this stage of the game. If anyone deserves to share the news outside of the main social media channels, it's him. He also shares news about Xbox sales and new releases, as you can see below:
What Do We Think Is On The Way?
This is what we thought before the reveal:
At the moment, we have no idea. Xbox's Games With Gold games are rarely leaked ahead of time and August 2021's titles aren't an exception. We could hazard a guess at a handful of older Xbox games but the odds of getting it right would be quite low. You can check out our predictions, though, here if you're looking for inspiration.
Xbox's Games With Gold service always offers two Xbox One games, an Xbox 360 game (via Backwards Compatability) and then the fourth title from Xbox's original selection of games (also via Backwards Compatability). This opens up the Games With Gold line-up to a lot of options and making accurate guesswork from Xbox's huge library of games is like trying to find a needle in a haystack at night with a blindfold on.
There is usually an older indie title on there, though, but the games being made available with Games With Gold are often missing from Xbox's Game Pass at the time. This does help cross a few names off the list but doesn't make it any easier to figure out what's coming.
When Will The New Games Be Available?
Unlike PlayStation's PS Plus games, Xbox releases its Games With Gold titles in a staggered format throughout the month.
There's always one title available for the entirety of the month. Then, one is available for the first half of the month and another is available for the second half. In addition to this, the fourth title is then available for the second half of this month and the first half of the next month.
It's an unusual system that is best explained with an example. Here's last month's release schedule...
As you can see, Planet Alpha was available for the entirety of the month. Conker was free for the first half and Midway Arcade Origins was available for the second half. Rock of Ages 3 is crossing over from July to August.
This system hasn't changed for a little while now so expect to see something similar from Xbox's August Games With Gold announcement later today.