Do you have to pay to play local Minecraft multiplayer on the Xbox One?

Hi Brookes! I'm Rostom, an Independent Advisor. I will be glad to help you here.

To play online and multiplayer on Xbox consoles, you must be subscribed to either Xbox Live Gold or Xbox Game Pass Ultimate.

Hey there, JohnathanShaw

Welcome to the Microsoft Community forums

You will need to pay for Xbox membership to play online with others, including your brother. You can, however, play multiplayer locally, however you will need to play Minecraft on an Xbox console, or you both have Minecraft Java Edition.

Hope this helps,

Nathan

Thanks, that's the problem

In order to play any multiplayer / online mode on Minecraft you need Gold / Ultimate

The only modes that doesn't require it are local multiplayer and single player.

You can check similar thread here:
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/xbox/forum/...

XBF Amber F answer:

"Minecraft itself may be played in an offline capacity without the need to have an Xbox Live Gold subscription; however, if your son wishes to utilize the following aspects of game play within Minecraft, he then would need a subscription:
Realms
Connecting to servers
Cross-platform play
For local multiplayer gaming, you don’t need an Xbox Live Gold subscription"

Thank you Reactor leak. Do you have any idea about difference between xbox live local multiplayer and xbox local multiplayer and xbox live local co-op. Does it require xbox live gold pass to play as local multiplayer (using 2 controllers)

Because Xbox 360 edition for minecraft is not supported anymore, I think you are only able to play local co-op instead of online multiplayer. I could be wrong though. If minecraft Xbox 360 does support multiplayer co-op, then the problem could be that
your kids have child accounts and their permissions for online multiplayer is turned off. I hope this helps!