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 at least what it costs to provide.
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.
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.
I just wanna go back to the time where games were offline by default and couldn’t be updated after release…
Asha is straight up bugging the fuck out. Time limits on play time what the fuck is even that?
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.
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.
@scrubbles @Prox I May Say something really bad about Microsoft approach to life, so I won’t
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.
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.
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.
Reminds me that i still need to delete my 20 year old MS Account from the 360 days.
I will loose my digitally purchased licenses. But lmao, my 360 already has bad avatar installed after which i never even touched it again. I did only out of spite. Yeah, well and the two games i bought in the microsoft store (yeah, i’m not the brightest one) arent accesable to me on Linux anyway.
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. 😬
Microsoft: “We are under no obligation to refund you your tariff overpayments.”
Also Microsoft:
5 hours of gameplay…a month. 10 hours…a month.
What even is this service for?
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 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.
Little too soon to attempt to slam the gates shut, no?
