Only 23 dollars.
From November, Xbox Cloud Gaming stops being unlimited.
- Game Pass Ultimate: 15 hours
- Game Pass Premium: 10 hours
- Game Pass Essential: 5 hours
Ultimate costs 22.99 dollars a month. GeForce Now's premium tiers include 100 hours.
The reason given
"We're introducing this model because the cost of providing cloud gaming grows as more people use it and play for longer," Xbox wrote. "Moving to monthly limits allows us to keep offering the service while continuing to invest in its reliability and performance. We understand that for some players the practical result is a higher cost."
No talk of enhanced flexibility or new options. Some of you will pay more.
According to reports, Microsoft expects 4% of subscribers to be affected against roughly 30 million, that's over a million people.
Where this actually comes from
CNBC's stated Microsoft executives across product organisations have been working out how to charge customers by usage, because demand for the company's finite compute keeps climbing.
That's the same compute pool feeding the AI business, the same buildout driving the component crisis behind console price rises. Cloud gaming is now competing internally against customers paying more per GPU-hour, and losing.
The timing problem
Asha Sharma recently stated that the industry needs to innovate on affordability and give people "more choice in terms of how they play their console and how they purchase their console."
Cloud gaming was that choice here play without buying hardware, on a phone, on an Xbox One, on a Linux machine. It's now a metered allowance, weeks after European console prices rose by up to 200 euros.
There is one genuinely new option: people without Game Pass can buy cloud hours outright and stream games they already own. Xbox One owners keep streaming Series XS titles rather than upgrading.
Reaction has been predictable. From Pure Xbox comments: "As someone who is part of that 4% (I travel a lot and my gaming PC is Linux), I am cancelling my game pass ultimate subscription at the end of this month."
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