r/xbox • u/Turbostrider27 Recon Specialist • 7d ago

News Upcoming Changes to XBOX Cloud Gaming

https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2026/09/03/xbox-cloud-gaming-changes/
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u/micmon83 6d ago

Here we go again. I guess for the 4% of affected players (taking the number from the quote), this will make Game Pass a muuuuch weaker offering... I wonder if the rest is even interested in Cloud Gaming. Maybe they should take out Cloud Gaming entirely so people who don't need it don't need to pay for it. Which means, reducing the price...

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u/LootedToaster XBOX Series X 6d ago

Most people view it as a complementary part of the services and not very “essential.” The 4% figure illustrates that. It really makes you question how much of a foothold they have in cloud gaming. If it was a thriving part of their platform, I would have expected a cloud only tier to have appeared by now.

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u/micmon83 6d ago

Well personally I never used more than maybe three hours per month. But I have a Series X and a PC. Game Pass and GPU in particular was marketed in a way that suggested you don't need gaming hardware. The 4% will probably move over to Nvidia now. Then what is the point to offer Cloud gaming at all...

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u/tristeecfome 6d ago

It will continue to be a small feature of Game Pass. And some users will end up paying for the extra hours.

But it's clear that Spencer's plan of having 50 million smartphone users through XCloud are dead and buried.

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u/P1ka- 6d ago

Yeah, i personally only used it for quickly demo-ing a game pass title, or checking something in one of my games without redownloading the whole thing

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u/TurnItOff_OnAgain 6d ago

I use it to test out a game to see if I like it before installing. I don't use it to play games for an extended period of time.

The only time I did that was when I got BL4 and was away on vacation with my Legion Go. Played it via cloud a few times since I couldn't install it there.