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?
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.
Is that per game? It has to be right?
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.
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.Nintendo:
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.
Microsoft: “We are under no obligation to refund you your tariff overpayments.”
Also Microsoft:
I’m glad my homegirl fitgirl doesn’t limit my play time.
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.
Asha is straight up bugging the fuck out. Time limits on play time what the fuck is even that?
yo ho ho and a bottle of rum
We recognize that introducing limits is a meaningful change, particularly for players who regularly spend more time gaming through the cloud. We expect this upcoming change to impact 4% of Game Pass subscribers.
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.
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.
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
I like GeForce Now but if this is where cloud gaming is going let me off the train.
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.
