Upcoming Changes to XBOX Cloud Gaming [time limits]

Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨ampersandrew@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨games@lemmy.world⁩

https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2026/09/03/xbox-cloud-gaming-changes/

Game Pass Ultimate: 15 hours

Game Pass Premium: 10 hours

Game Pass Essential: 5 hours

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 what it costs to provide.

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Comments

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RamRabbit@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
5 hours of gameplay…a month. 10 hours…a month.

What even is this service for?

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- thingsiplay@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  For this:
  
  Once subscribers use their included hours, they will be able to purchase additional cloud playtime through the XBOX Store
  
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  - tuxiqae@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    I love that they don’t mention how much the additional playtime will cost
    
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  - bandanawearingbanana@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    I miss playing in Arcades.
    
    Wait no, not like that!
    
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  - Evotech@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    We understand lmao
    
    WE DESIGNED FOR IT
    
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  - tonywu@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    Literally turning Xbox cloud gaming into gacha. Well done lol
    
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- ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - otacon239@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    Oh my gosh OnLive. I had almost forgotten.
    
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- EonNShadow@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  Creating shareholder value
  
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- ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  I just can’t believe SO many people are blowing their money on it, if it truly will only effect 4% of users.
  
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  - ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    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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- gothic_lemons@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  Is that per game? It has to be right?
  
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scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
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

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- Prox@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  For real. Cloud gaming was just starting to get somewhat appealing, here they are killing any momentum it may have had.
  
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  - scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    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.
    
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newthrowaway20@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
LOL 15 hrs a month at most?! So they don’t want anyone to actually use this, I take it.

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- ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  Of course not. It’s expensive. That’s why Stadia isn’t still around.
  
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LiveLM@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
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.

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PMmeTrebuchets@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
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.

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- meejle@piefed.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  Especially when the “Ultimate” tier doesn’t even give you long enough to finish most games. 😬
  
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Prox@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
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.

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- SparroHawc@piefed.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  I’d say this should herald a surge in PC gaming, but …. well, no one can afford PC hardware any more.
  
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- ms_lane@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  Nintendo:
  
  Image
  
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Sanctus@anarchist.nexus ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
Little too soon to attempt to slam the gates shut, no?

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lIlIlIlIlIlIl@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
Microsoft: “We are under no obligation to refund you your tariff overpayments.”

Also Microsoft:

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mp3@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
I just wanna go back to the time where games were offline by default and couldn’t be updated after release…

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- iamthetot@piefed.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  You had me up until “couldn’t be updated after release.”
  
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  - mp3@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    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.
    
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PoopMonster@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
I’m glad my homegirl fitgirl doesn’t limit my play time.

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warmaster@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
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 step closer.

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uSeRnAmE396@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
Image

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thingsiplay@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
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.

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shweddy@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
Asha is straight up bugging the fuck out. Time limits on play time what the fuck is even that?

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Mordikan@kbin.earth ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
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.

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- iamthetot@piefed.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  They are trying to take away your hardware so that streaming is your only option, shitty infrastructure or not.
  
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  - ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    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.
    
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HarkMahlberg@kbin.earth ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
This is "just" for cloud gaming right? Like if you install a game locally through game pass, these limits don't apply... Right?

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- ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  Correct. Only cloud.
  
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  - HarkMahlberg@kbin.earth ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    I can't help but think it's only a matter of time before they manage to make that limit work locally, even if you're not internet connected.
    
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Katana314@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
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.

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qarbone@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

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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- ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  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.
  
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LettyWhiterock@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
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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- ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  I think they’re hoping to make a profit off of what they’re charging rather than loss leading.
  
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  - LettyWhiterock@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    At some point you gotta offer a decent product if you want people to use it, let alone make a profit off it.
    
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mrfriki@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
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.

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toxicbubble@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
yo ho ho and a bottle of rum

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goferking0@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
Hey the thing everyone expected cloud/streaming gaming to do happened!.. I sadly thought it wouldn’t until mid 2027 or 2028

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boke@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
Play has no limi… oh…

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BadFanFiction@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
I like GeForce Now but if this is where cloud gaming is going let me off the train.

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darkmogool@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
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…

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- ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  Because this is more like a side benefit to Game Pass. Most people are playing locally, not cloud.
  
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BreakerSwitch@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
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

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