One million dormant Xbox Live gamertags can be yours starting Wednesday

Wednesday rollout will include "proper nouns," "greatest inventions of all time."

Sam Machkovech – May 16, 2016 7:56 PM | 37

Credit: Xbox

Are you the type to dash madly toward any new online service’s sign-up page even if you think you’ll never touch it again, just to lock down your username of choice? As any good geek knows, handles are a precious commodity, especially for free services that don’t have explicitly advertised nickname-recycling policies.

One online ecosystem, Xbox Live, may have a respite in store for users who want to remove extraneous numbers or characters from their Gamertag of choice. A Monday announcement from Xbox Live PR chief Larry “Major Nelson” Hryb confirmed that a slew of “nearly one million” dormant Gamertags will be made available for qualified Xbox Live Gold members starting on Wednesday, May 18, at 2pm EDT.

Microsoft has apparently been careful about what “dormant” means. This pile of names has been freed from a pool of Gamertags that were created on the original Xbox console and remained unused since that console’s servers went offline in 2010, meaning they were never used to log onto either newer console or through Microsoft’s Web-browser interface. Gamertags have always been free to create, even before Microsoft introduced separate “silver” and “gold” tiers of Xbox Live service on the 360 console, so certain juicy-sounding handles may very well have been created by original Xbox owners who had no intention of remaining longtime Xbox Live gamers. (Microsoft released dormant Xbox Live handles from the original-Xbox era in 2011 as well, but not as many.)

According to Hryb, Microsoft will not publish a list of available names ahead of the Wednesday rollout, but he suggested that fans would be able to claim names that reference “proper names, pop culture references, types of food, geography and travel, science and technology, math and numbers, animals, and some of the greatest inventions of all time.” We can only begin to guess what kind of unclaimed gold will be unearthed in those categories (which max out at 15 characters), but a cursory search for names that currently have zero "gamerscore" (which indicates dormancy since the Xbox 360 era) include Nostradamus, GrilledCheese, and Nintendo. So who knows what will become available this Wednesday?

To join in the name-change fun, users must have at least one year of “cumulative Xbox Live Gold tenure” under their belts (and be current, active Xbox Live Gold users). Xbox Live policy permits one free Gamertag change request in a user’s lifetime, after which they have to pay $10 for a swap, so if this nickname dump sees you making your first name-change request, you won’t have to pay. Hyrb encourages fans to keep checking for their preferred name over a full 24-hour span after the Wednesday rollout begins.