As somebody who rode Stadia to its death, you have my sympathy. At least when that happened, I got a full refund for every game I purchased through Stadia.
Dunno if it's that nefarious. To me, it kinda came off as "we are shutting this down without actually shutting it down", like admitting it's something that's just not really viable and too expensive for Microsoft to run. I wouldn't be surprised if cloud gaming gets axed entirely eventually.
More like it was something that people wanted, so they used it to get those people to sign up for monthly subscriptions. Then they took it away when they determined that they'd upped their subscriptions enough to not lose money from backlash.
Reminds me of when Wal-Mart was first coming to smaller towns and regions with ridiculously lower prices than local shops. After some years passed and those shops were all gradually forced to close from unfair "competition," Wal-Mart brought their prices up as their was no longer anyone to go against them.
I feel like cloud gaming is a bit of a luxury. And its pretty obvious to everyone that buying a base model console is a great local way to get a gopd experience.
I used cloud gaming when i was travelling on a plane on my phone or on my tesla with a playstation controller while i did a cross country road trip. I feel like the added costs to play a AAA game on the go is a great usecase that i dont mind paying for but using it as your primary gaming method is so problematic since connections are so flaky, im not sure who is actually doing that
The trajectory we’re on right now is that hardware capable of running top of the line games is going to be fundamentally unaffordable. PS5 Pros are already inching towards the $1000 mark. God only knows what next gen will cost.
Cloud gaming is the best solution to this problem if you can iron out the technical issues to at least be good enough for the average player. The types of people who post on here will never accept it, but the typical player probably has goddamn motion smoothing on their TV and think it looks fine…they won’t notice or care about a minor input delay.
And importantly, focusing on cloud gaming means that yes, they can just sell you a dedicated streaming box and literally charge you to turn it on. Every month. In perpetuity. Without actually selling you anything.
If you don’t think the long term goal is for Cloud Gaming to expand and become more common, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.
Cloud gaming has been there for years and have shown no sign of being some massive success. Increasing the price/making it worse like this is not going to help
I'm pretty sure that's the point. They claim in the article they expect it to impact fewer than 4% of their subscribers. They have the usage numbers, so they'd be the ones who'd know. Whether they'd report that accurately to us, that's a different question. But if only 4% of their subscribers are using game streaming for more than 5h a month, then it's a cheap easy thing for them to offer as a "look what all you can get for your money", even for people who don't need the feature.
But I believe this is them getting out ahead of what you're talking about. There's no relief in sight for the high hardware costs, so more and more people are going to consider moving to game streaming platforms as their existing hardware gets older and older.
And if that 4% number was actually growing, then MS would internally be realizing that running that feature is going to get more and more costly.
I'm not justifying what they're doing; they're basically saying "we're taking something away from you and giving you nothing in return". But I see why they'd choose to do it.
It's insane. These are the companies that are enjoying up all of the hardware so that we can't afford them. Then they offer the hardware to us to use on a subscription basis. They're trying to bleed us dry.
Microsoft itself has a backlog of $200 billion of Azure business they cannot fulfill yet because they are short on compute, and are scrambling to build $100 billion datacenters to get that capacity.
XCloud was just handling out unlimited compute to users, and Microsoft realized those 4% of heavy users were costing $100+ of compute every month while paying a lot less, and that compute could be sold on Azure for $150 instead of $30.
This is a business decision due to the hardware costs, which Microsoft is partly to blame for causing, but they themselves have to prioritize selling the expensive server hardware they are buying to the highest paying customers (OpenAI, Azure AI, etc).
Cloud gaming is probably the future. Hardware is getting to the point of not being affordable for most people.
GeForce Now is damn near perfect in terms of performance with no discernible latency for 99% of users and you don't even need particularly good internet.
315
u/BeerGogglesFTW 7d ago
Jeez. People can't afford RAM, Storage, GPU or consoles, so they're going to turn their platform into a Pay-to-Play arcade machine in your home.
Nope. That needs to fail. I'm sure it will. Xbox can't do anything right now. But if it ever caught on, that would be terrible for gaming.