5 hours of gameplay....a month. 10 hours....a month.
What even is this service for?
this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2026
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Games
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For this:
Once subscribers use their included hours, they will be able to purchase additional cloud playtime through the XBOX Store
We understand that for some players the practical result is a higher cost.
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.
Creating shareholder value
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."
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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.
- iPod landed but lacked video. Microsoft makes the Zune and it was awesome, but clunky software and a boxy shape made it fall, and they killed it before a needed v2.
- Xbox & Xbox 360 had Microsoft riding high, and then they ignored gamers and threw away their target market with the Xbox One
- Hololens promised true AR gaming, and they threw that out before they even made a consumer version.
- Mixed Reality followed Hololens, was genuinely a cheaper VR alternative, had one myself. Then they silently killed it before reducing the hardware to ewaste a couple of years later.
- Windows 7 was their best OS after XP, so of course they change everything about it to make Windows 8
- Skype was the only video calling service that people regularly used, and they bloated it and enshittified it, causing it to collapse just a few years before Covid, allowing Zoom to take over.
- Cortana had genuinely more functionality than Alexa, but they stopped investing in it, forced it down everyone's throats, then sunset it, leaving ewaste speakers.
(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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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?
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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?
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yo ho ho and a bottle of rum
Play has no limi… oh..
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