Upcoming Changes to XBOX Cloud Gaming [time limits]
XBOX Wire
Upcoming Changes to XBOX Cloud Gaming
Beginning in November, we’re changing how cloud gaming is included with XBOX Game Pass.
Game Pass Ultimate: 15 hours / month
Game Pass Premium: 10 hours / month
Game Pass Essential: 5 hours / month
And if you’ll allow me to editorialize, there’s a popular enough conspiracy theory that these platforms want to funnel you into cloud gaming for constant subscription revenue. I think the Why We’re Making These Changes section is exactly why these services will never be able to deliver that service at a price people are willing to pay. It’s expensive to provide this service, and they’re making sure they don’t lose any money on it by charging at least what it costs to provide.
5 hours of gameplay…a month. 10 hours…a month.
What even is this service for?
For this:
I love that they don’t mention how much the additional playtime will cost
one-billion-dollars.jpg (png delivery requires ultimate subscription).
I miss playing in Arcades.
Wait no, not like that!
Haha. At least you can play as long as you have skills. Well games were a bit unfair, but that’s another story. Yeah, I’m glad we don’t have pay to win anymo… oh… never mind.
We understand lmao
WE DESIGNED FOR IT
Literally turning Xbox cloud gaming into gacha. Well done lol
I edited the post to spell that out now. But it really only ever made financial sense for both parties if it was a value add on top of what you already get with Game Pass. We all know how OnLive and Stadia worked out.
Oh my gosh OnLive. I had almost forgotten.
I just can’t believe SO many people are blowing their money on it, if it truly will only effect 4% of users.
More like, “Of their Game Pass users, very few use the cloud gaming feature, and even fewer of them would exceed these limits.”
Creating shareholder value
Is that per game? It has to be right?
Wow they’re really efficient at enshittification now. They don’t even need to wait for buyin or for the service to be successful! They just enshittify it early now
For real. Cloud gaming was just starting to get somewhat appealing, here they are killing any momentum it may have had.
I’ve learned that’s just kind of Microsoft’s thing. Whenever they have a product that might actually be a “disruptor” they figure out a way to shoot themselves in the foot.
(and so many more)
They either come up with a good idea and half ass the execution, leaving the consumer disappointed, or they kill it off before it ever has a chance to take off. Google I guess at least let’s a product get to it’s highest peak making sure they disappoint the maximum amount of users, but Microsoft just makes sure that the users never even arrive.
Kinect my beloved
LOL 15 hrs a month at most?! So they don’t want anyone to actually use this for gaming full time, I take it.
Of course not. It’s expensive. That’s why Stadia isn’t still around.
So if you partake in egregiously long gaming sessions of one (1) hour per day, the best plan they have runs out in half a month.
Lmao.
5 hours a month? Lmao? Are we serious? I will do that in a single evening. This isn’t going to make me go up a tier. It’s just gonna entice me to unsub from fallout first and put the game down.
Especially when the “Ultimate” tier doesn’t even give you long enough to finish most games. 😬
Xbox snatching defeat from the jaws of victory yet again.
Sony is fucking up left and right, and gamers are pissed at them. This should be a slam dunk situation for Microsoft, but here we are.
I’d say this should herald a surge in PC gaming, but …. well, no one can afford PC hardware any more.
Nintendo:
Little too soon to attempt to slam the gates shut, no?
Microsoft: “We are under no obligation to refund you your tariff overpayments.”
Also Microsoft:
I just wanna go back to the time where games were offline by default and couldn’t be updated after release…
You had me up until “couldn’t be updated after release.”
Why? It made it really important for developers and publishers to release a polished game that worked on day one, because if you fucked up, you’d have to recall the cartridges or discs for replacement.
And you know what you bought would keep working, wouldn’t require a patch or download if you used it in another game console, decades after, without needing anything but a functional cartridge/disc+console, even if the publisher/developer/console maker doesn’t exist anymore.
You’ve got some rose coloured nastalgia glasses on, methinks. Games were not always polished to a shine, and they certainly were not bug free. Watch any speedrun of retro games of you think that’s true.
Updates allow for improvements over time. I think that post release updates for games have been way more of a pro than a con in the grand scheme.
My much bigger issue is server side connections being required for things.
Yeah it definitely wasn’t all perfect, but at least major bugs were ironed out before launch. I don’t mind the glitch here and there, what bothers me is the quality of games when they release, some are truely pushed out to be sold way too early because the worst thing that can happen is a bit of bad press.
These are great news!
The service is starving and on life support, soon the biggest cloud streaming service and defender will cease to exist and ownership is one small step closer to being the only option.
I’m glad my homegirl fitgirl doesn’t limit my play time.
Divide 300 minutes (that’s 5 hours) by 30 days, to see how many minutes you can play every day: 10 minutes. If we have 15 hours per month, that’s 30 minutes playtime every day.
I miss the old days where I just popped in the disk, disc or cart in and start playing without internet reliance.
Asha is straight up bugging the fuck out. Time limits on play time what the fuck is even that?
This is "just" for cloud gaming right? Like if you install a game locally through game pass, these limits don't apply... Right?
Correct. Only cloud.
I can't help but think it's only a matter of time before they manage to make that limit work on locally installed games, even if you're not internet connected.
Why? That’s something only the market leader could hope to get away with, and they’re not the market leader in console or PC.
They’ll change it to 2 game downloads a month 😂😂
I don't see how game streaming at least in the US market would ever work without higher performance infrastructure anyway. Functionally, it's not a matter of bandwidth but latency. Xbox servers are centralized regionally, so even with latency within WebRTC range (like sub-20ms), cross-country traversal can add up to 30ms which makes games feel awful in terms of control.
They are trying to take away your hardware so that streaming is your only option, shitty infrastructure or not.
It reads much more to me like trying to package up Xbox as a business that isn’t trying to loss lead so that someone else can afford to buy it off of Microsoft’s hands.
[deleted]
Now I’m wondering if this might not have happened if the RAM crisis never happened.
They have a lot of upkeep on the backend hardware so people can use these services. As server costs go up, it’s likely they’re now strongly motivated to kill the appeal of their own service. In another future where hardware costs were still reasonable, maybe they would’ve let it go.
Wow those rates are outright stupid. Someone looked at those numbers and decided that was a good idea. Are they braindead or are they hoping for this to fail?
I think they’re hoping to make a profit off of what they’re charging rather than loss leading.
At some point you gotta offer a decent product if you want people to use it, let alone make a profit off it.
To my eye, all of the moves Xbox has made lately is to package up something that someone else can afford to buy off of Microsoft’s hands, and that includes selling them a subscription service that brings in more money than it costs. That’s only conjecture, but it seems to fit.
These services never were for me, I have good internet but the servers must be just too far away. But at these rates I’m not sure who this is for.
You tell me only 4% of their audience plays more than 15 hrs in a month?
And, if so few subscribers are playing that much, why force new plans that cost more to limit people that weren’t even stressing your network/capabilities?
Cloud play is one feature of Game Pass, but for most, I suspect the main draw is downloading a game and playing natively when it’s an option. It’s not a surprise to me that 96% of players are not playing more than 15 hours per month on cloud.
I like GeForce Now but if this is where cloud gaming is going let me off the train.
Play has no limi… oh…
yo ho ho and a bottle of rum
They’ll keep going until it’s above the price of hardware ownership (a lot, these days), but fed in small enough increments that it’s more affordable to the poor
Sorry, but why does someone would pay for this? Being limited in playtame AND over a $/h? There are shure enough people who opt in… or still not opt out after this…
Because this is more like a side benefit to Game Pass. Most people are playing locally, not cloud.
Hey the thing everyone expected cloud/streaming gaming to do happened!.. I sadly thought it wouldn’t until mid 2027 or 2028