Upcoming Changes to XBOX Cloud Gaming [time limits]

Submitted ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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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LiveLM@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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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RamRabbit@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
5 hours of gameplay…a month. 10 hours…a month.

What even is this service for?

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- thingsiplay@lemmy.ml ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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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- ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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 ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Oh my gosh OnLive. I had almost forgotten.
    
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BadFanFiction@lemmy.world ⁨48⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago
I like GeForce Now but if this is where cloud gaming is going let me off the train.

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scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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 ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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 ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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 ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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 ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Of course not. It’s expensive. That’s why Stadia isn’t still around.
  
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PMmeTrebuchets@lemmy.zip ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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 ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Especially when the “Ultimate” tier doesn’t even give you long enough to finish most games. 😬
  
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warmaster@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ 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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Prox@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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 ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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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Sanctus@anarchist.nexus ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Little too soon to attempt to slam the gates shut, no?

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lIlIlIlIlIlIl@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Microsoft: “We are under no obligation to refund you your tariff overpayments.”

Also Microsoft:

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mp3@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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 ⁨58⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago
  You had me up until “couldn’t be updated after release.”
  
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HarkMahlberg@kbin.earth ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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 ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Correct. Only cloud.
  
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  - HarkMahlberg@kbin.earth ⁨49⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ 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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shweddy@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Asha is straight up bugging the fuck out. Time limits on play time what the fuck is even that?

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thingsiplay@lemmy.ml ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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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uSeRnAmE396@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Image

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Mordikan@kbin.earth ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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 ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  They are trying to take away your hardware so that streaming is your only option, shitty infrastructure or not.
  
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mrfriki@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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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