Xbox Family Packs becoming individual accounts beginning Aug. 27

Xbox Live Gold Family Packs will convert to individual Xbox Live Gold memberships "as early as" Aug. 27, according to an FAQ posted on the Xbox Support website.

Family Pack members will also receive an additional three months of Gold membership up to 36 months, which will be added to the remaining months of Xbox Live Gold Family Pack membership at conversion. Members will receive an email confirming the new Gold memberships "within approximately one week" of the accounts' conversion."

Earlier this year, Microsoft stopped selling the Xbox Live Gold Family Pack, which offered a discount to families purchasing multiple Gold memberships. A Microsoft spokesperson told Polygon in March 2013 that the company would "not be replacing the Family Gold program" and was "not announcing any new programs at this time."

Two features will be disabled with the conversion. Users will no longer be able to access activity monitoring reports for Xbox Live Gold Family Pack users or allocate Microsoft Points between users.

Last week, Microsoft chief product officer Marc Whitten announced that the company would retire Microsoft Points in favor of local currency with the next Xbox 360 system update. Family Pack users can make their final Microsoft Points allocations until the conversion. Each account with Microsoft Points not converted before the transition will have their balances translated to local currency when users of each account initiate a purchase or redeem a Microsoft Points card.

Only the primary converted Xbox Live Gold account will automatically renew after the transition. Users will need to "add or update the billing information" for each new Xbox Live Gold plan to initiate the auto-renew feature.

Polygon spoke with Marc Whitten about the Xbox One Home Gold program recently, which will allow multiple users to share a single Xbox Live Gold account on the next-gen console. Home Gold, which is tied to both a Gamertag and a home console, allows other users to access Gold features like multiplayer, entertainment apps like Netflix and Game DVR.

"So how it works is, on your console, anybody else on the console, whether it's a babysitter that's come over or a friend or your family, can participate in all the experiences like they're on Gold," Whitten told Polygon. "It's with their Gamertag so they're not on your Gamertag, you don't even have to be there, they're not messing up your Gamerscore or your storage or your queues or anything like that. It's their full account experience, but it really gets to take full advantage of many of the Gold features."