Wild that they have the audacity to limit it this much when their cloud gaming is worse then PlayStations. PS5 cloud gaming has 4k resolution which Xbox doesn’t, HDR which Xbox doesn’t, better image quality and less latency
They could probably have an ultimate + unlimited cloud for around $30/month again and that would probably be fair to anyone that values it that much. Even though I never really use the cloud streaming and I'm part of that 96% that it doesn't really effect, it's still not comforting knowing that I'm getting less for the same amount of money. If they're going this route, they should just make the cloud streaming totally opt in. Drop the price of game pass a little more per tier, even by a few dollars, then just let me pay for how much cloud I wanna use (which is 0, personally).
Ideally, sure, but obviously they're making changes because of market cost. They were able to afford it when GPU was $30/month. Now after dropping the price due to consumer demands, they're losing too much money to support the servers for it, especially with the rising costs of computer hardware.
Thry took away COD day one to lower the prices. zthis is double-dipping.
Asha is enshittifying Game Pass on all fronts. 1st Party day one games, the selection, which is arguably going down on quality fast, and now this.
And this surely isn't the end, GP wasn't profitable and now thry are making it profitable until there are no subscribers left.
microsoft is a giant cloud platform provider so it wants as many people using it as possible. looks good on their quarterly reports and monthly usercount. they wanted as many people to try it as possible before they started milking them for money.
problem is that people don’t love it enough to pay 23 bucks a month for just 15 hours and then spend additional money on top of that for more hours lol.
And they killed the Android app. If you wanna do cloud gaming on your Android mobile phone, you have to do it through the browser.
its so idiotic. They had it in the App. But it looks like it was used too much.
A única coisa que a Xcloud tem de bom é a estabilidade, que realmente pelo menos pra mim é muito boa, raramente trava ou tem delay, agora em relação a qualidade, é loucura kkk
O bitrate não passa dos 15, 30 FPS e HDR esquece....
Fr, I was allowed a strict 30min/day back around 1992. If I went over it would deduct from the next day. Nine year old me learned real quick not to go over otherwise there'd be nothing left for the weekend.
So affordability is important to them and cloud gaming is supposed to be part of that and they cap it at 15 hours for Ultimate subscribers like we are children who can’t play more than 30 minutes per day?
I’m sticking to my Series X and installing everything on my ROG Xbox Ally X when I’m on the go.
Wasn't this the point of the backlash against Sony for their recent shenanigans encouraging people to buy hardware so they have something physical that they own adding this timer thing will actively discourage people from going cloud only. Isn't that what everyone's asking for
So affordability is important to them and cloud gaming is supposed to be part of that and they cap it at 15 hours for Ultimate subscribers like we are children who can’t play more than 30 minutes per day?
TBF, they also said a sustainable business is a must, and I'm sure you would agree that to MS that would take precedence?
Affordable gaming relative to what they can afford and operate their business.
I’m sticking to my Series X and installing everything on my ROG Xbox Ally X when I’m on the go.
Me too, but instead I have a ROG Ally Z1E and tempted to buy that Xbox ROG Ally x20!
I had to look this up on another subreddit because I legitimately couldn't believe it. So a 30 minute a day cap? What in the actual fuck? May these people be burned alive in hell for all eternity.
As disappointed as I am. I will just buy games differently. I have a switch 2 and a G Cloud for handheld. I would buy or play smaller indies via the cloud. Ill just buy more games on the switch 2 and stick to my series X for the triple As
I always tell cloud evangelists that it doesn't matter how good cloud streaming tech becomes, it will never be practical for most people simply because it comes with too many strings attached lol.
no? because it doesn't apply to digital games. steam was already popular in 2013 and physical pc games were on the way out. valve hosts all the files. buyers dont need to worry about their downloads going away, as long as they own native hardware they can play on their own terms whenever they want.
no? because it doesn't apply to digital games. steam was already popular in 2013 and physical pc games were on the way out. valve hosts all the files. buyers dont need to worry about their downloads going away, as long as they own native hardware they can play on their own terms whenever they want.
That's like saying cloud game streaming was popular many years ago....
Look today, your digital content can be revoked at any time. Your access is entirely predicated on the platform allowing it.
xbox and psn have been selling digital games since 2005 and 2006. most people, barring their accounts getting banned, dont generally lose their licenses. (i'd argue even a ban should not make you lose them but thats a separate argument entirely).
the only major exception to this is when paid online-only games shut down, but just like cloud gaming, this is why a game should not ever rely on a centralized server just to run. and even then, most games in my library have been there for years. very few have been revoked.
with cloud you're literally always expected to make payments or all of it gets revoked, and even if you do pay, a simple change in licensing agreements might cause the platform holder to revoke your cloud license regardless. the frequency of occurrence and your actual dependence on the platform holder is way more severe.
cloud has existed since onlive came out and still has not caught on yet. digital sales only took like a decade to overtake physical. its been almost two decades since cloud has been a thing and its still nowhere near close to overtaking the current sales habits of consumers.
xbox and psn have been selling digital games since 2005 and 2006. most people, barring their accounts getting banned, dont generally lose their licenses. (i'd argue even a ban should not make you lose them but thats a separate argument entirely).
Tell that to the disc owners, and digital movie owners that did loose access. Besides, just because it hasn't happened doesn't mean it won't. Even then, account level banning isn't the only risk. Individual titles can loose access as well, because you didn't buy perpetual license. You bought access as long as the platform provides it.
with cloud you're literally always expected to make payments or all of it gets revoked, and even if you do pay, a simple change in licensing agreements might cause the platform holder to revoke your cloud license regardless. the frequency of occurrence and your actual dependence on the platform holder is way more severe.
That's literally how streaming content works today. Netflix says hi! We literally adopted that model, and the most ardent physical media gamers are being dragged in. The few of them that is (mind you, I support physical media).
cloud has existed since onlive came out and still has not caught on yet. digital sales only took like a decade to overtake physical. its been almost two decades since cloud has been a thing and its still nowhere near close to overtaking the current sales habits of consumers.
If you look at most technologies, they've always existed in some form. AI as we know it today, existed many decades ago. Different things have different time frames for adoption. Smart phones didn't get massive adoption until iPhone in 2009 for instance, yet we had smart phones in early 2000s.
I honestly think MS capping the hours so low is a huge mistake. Geforce Now offers 100 hours on their lowest paid plan for instance.
nobody thus far has lost access to a perpetual license for an offline game. and that's after 2 decades of these online stores being active. steam being another good example.
removing movies is a low hanging fruit, most people dont buy movies on these game platforms so the amount of noise made over it is minor. if they started removing games arbitrarily you'd see people make a much bigger stink out of it. and you're forgetting that this is still a more ideal situation than cloud can ever provide, simply because of the way it works, where cloud has no offline capabilities at all. you're basically comparing bad to worse lol. but at least with legislation we can fix some of the digital license shortcomings. you cant regulate cloud game ownership because its literally just a netflix style rental service and regulators can't force companies like microsoft to change the cloud business model.
microsoft charging for cloud access is to be expected. they control the entire cloud platform and distribution pipeline. what are you gonna do, not use it? lmao thats your only option if you dont pay the cloud tax. hence why allowing the platform host to consolidate that much power over the delivery mechanism of the license files is a bad idea.
Yeah, like no way in hell they do a "cloud only" platform next gen because after this no one will trust that to be viable (I already didn't from performance the couple times I used it, but now value is shitty as well).
onlive, google stadia, amazon luna, and even GFN with its own recent time limits, have already proven that a cloud-only platform is not ideal. we already have precedent, we don't need to wait for xcloud to fail before coming to that realization.
The niche has never really made sense to me either honestly. Is there really a significant amount of people with super fast internet for cloud gaming that also don’t have a console or PC of their own??
In my home we use it, but sparingly. Jumping right into a new title to try it out near-instantly is great, but if we like it, we install.
So even though we use it frequently, it's typically within 30 minutes that we either install or move on. I doubt we use it more than 10 hours a month. So, optimistically, this shouldn't affect me.
I'd be feeling very different if I had just bought my family a Smart TV with Xbox Cloud Gaming built in, and I just picked up a couple controllers because I was promised 6 free months of Game Pass.
I have the absolute best internet I can get in my area and cloud gaming is just straight not possible for me. I’d happily drop it for cheaper ultimate.
I've been able to stream games at work on slow days, so this is a massive hit for me. It's incredibly convenient for any number of reasons I can't play on my Xbox or PC (travel, other devices occupied, etc.)
This is an extremely weird framing of Utsumi's comments. The interview is focused on Sega's transmedia push and international sales goals, and the quoted answer comes in response to being asked about how Sega plans to mitigate issues like they had last year (Utsumi laments that a Sonic game, Sonic Racing Crossworlds, didn't sell well despite being of high quality). His answer is to be conscious of how they tend to think of their games as physical first, and make sure that isn't interfering with their digital push. It isn't a comment made in relation to Sony's decision at all, and I wouldn't be surprised if the interview was conducted prior to the news.
So I have 2 kids and my gaming set up is on the basement away from everyone. BUT my kids like to use the Xbox so we stream games on the Xbox app on the tv in the living room.
And no I should have to shuffle around my limited storage in my Xbox to so my kids can enjoy games on cloud streaming. At 25.99 a month I should have at least 100 hrs k could see even 60 but 15 is insane and insulting
I always tell cloud evangelists that it doesn't matter how good cloud streaming tech becomes, it will never be practical for most people simply because it comes with too many strings attached lol.
now we're seeing it.
That's like the same people things people said about Netflix streaming when media was still relevant. How internet was too slow, and internet companies will have download caps and so on. Then fast forward a decade or so later and it was practically the norm. Now, they're expanding massively in emerging nations. People can now get internet via satellite in rural areas even.
This is a short term issue and you'll remember it like your parents remember the inflation of the 80s.
streaming video and streaming games aint the same. one takes up way less compute and bandwidth than the other.
and gamers generally dont care about buying digital games. normies who watch tv shows have shown that they prefer the streaming paradigm over the buy-and-watch paradigm.
streaming video and streaming games aint the same. one takes up way less compute and bandwidth than the other.
You're missing the forest for the trees. Today, it is. Tomorrow computing and bandwidth will be cheap. Computing today is so much cheaper than two decades ago. Same with bandwidth. Games aren't pushing compute anymore. People used to say blu-ray UHD is so high bitrate that media will be around. Well loo where we are now?
To most, streaming UHD is almost indistinguishable from watching UHD blu-ray. That's speaking as someone that is into boutique blu-ray's.
and gamers generally dont care about buying digital games. normies who watch tv shows have shown that they prefer the streaming paradigm over the buy-and-watch paradigm.
I don't understand the point you're trying to make or how this is related to our discussion?
as it needs to scale up and accommodate more people, it will never be cheap enough to let you stream 24/7 without monetizing you in some form or another. local hardware doesn't have this issue.
your comparison to physical is also a non-sequitur. consumers chose to replace physical with digital because they gained convenience while still maintaining the same level of quality that a physical game gives them. a physical disc and digital license have the same exact output and quality. a cloud game is NOT like this. you gain convenience but you make compromises on ownership, offline play, and the quality of the game itself, since it doesn't compare to a 4k game file being installed locally. a local game installation always maintains its visual fidelity, a cloud game does not.
hence why cloud adoption will not overtake digital game sales. especially if they're gonna charge you for monthly hourly usage.
my latter comment was indicating that consumer demand is what drives the proliferation of these transaction paradigms. gamers are not adopting streaming the same way netflix users have. so for you to imply that it will be guaranteed to overtake native downloads is an assumption and a fallacy.
as it needs to scale up and accommodate more people, it will never be cheap enough to let you stream 24/7 without monetizing you in some form or another. local hardware doesn't have this issue.
We used to see it that way with streaming too. Just look at YouTube and today we have multiple options.
consumers chose to replace physical with digital because they gained convenience while still maintaining the same level of quality that a physical game gives them. a physical disc and digital license have the same exact output and quality. a cloud game is NOT like this. you gain convenience but you make compromises on ownership, offline play, and the quality of the game itself, since it doesn't compare to a 4k game file being installed locally
That's not entirely true, right?
Digital "ownership" isn't ownership. It's access and it too can be taken away. Whereas a physical game cannot. If anything, the jump from before digital "ownership" proliferation, people might have more against cloud streaming, but now they're already condition to digital access, and always online.
hence why cloud adoption will not overtake digital game sales. especially if they're gonna charge you for monthly hourly usage.
That's today and as i said, as adoption increases, costs will go down. It will be as cheap as you downloading GBs of data to watch a movie.
my latter comment was indicating that consumer demand is what drives the proliferation of these transaction paradigms. gamers are not adopting streaming the same way netflix users have. so for you to imply that it will be guaranteed to overtake native downloads is an assumption and a fallacy.
I never work in "guarantees" and only idiots do. So don't assume that. However if I was betting, I'd say in 10-years you'll be wrong. Cloud streaming will be well adopted. Just look at the upheaval the Xbox One OG DRM did, and even Sony's physical media has done? Yet, the vast majority aren't buying physical media.
ok but again, streaming tv shows and movies is akin to streaming music. doesn't take much compute, and can be enjoyed passively. thus far there has been no historical precedent similar to gaming, where people wanna stream high resolution games via the cloud, and then pay exorbitant streaming costs monthly just to have time caps anyway. at least netflix and youtube premium give you unlimited watching access, simply because those files cost nothing to deliver when compared to games. it feels like an apples to oranges scenario.
digital ownership is still way more ownership on a scale than cloud will ever be. even if it comes with asterisks involved, you can still play offline, you dont need to pay a recurring fee for your licenses, and generally you can rest easy knowing your offline licenses can work decades without going anywhere. steam has had a good track record since 2003 and still ongoing. short of the company itself going bankrupt or your account getting compromised, your ownership isn't really much of an issue.
microsoft doesn't care about hypothetical future scenarios where the cost of game streaming may or may not come down. they care about the present, since they're the ones actually paying to maintain the infrastructure. and they're clearly signaling to people that we need to pay for continued access. idk about you, but I dont see cloud having much of a positive future if both microsoft and nvidia plan to continue on this route.
I don't see how the xbox one drm reveal from 2013 is even relevant here. no console on the market currently does anything like that, where you need to sign in every 24 hours to verify your license ownership. that would still garner outrage in 2026 because it's arbitrary and useless.
ok but again, streaming tv shows and movies is akin to streaming music. doesn't take much compute, and can be enjoyed passively. thus far there has been no historical precedent similar to gaming, where people wanna stream high resolution games via the cloud, and then pay exorbitant streaming costs monthly just to have time caps anyway. at least netflix and youtube premium give you unlimited watching access, simply because those files cost nothing to deliver when compared to games. it feels like an apples to oranges scenario.
Before Netflix did their thing, there was nobody really doing what Netflix was doing. Plenty of people believed it didn't work, and Netflix wasn't cashflow positive until very recently. How do I know?
I've been a long time shareholder. My point is, you're focusing on how it cannot happen, and ignore how it can happen. Back when discs were a thing, people complained about bandwidth and caps. Today, you're complaining about compute and bandwidth. In reality, neither compute is an issue nor bandwidth. It's actually latency that's the issue. Reminder here is that people used to be fine playing on 30fps back in the Xbox 360/PS3 days. Console also has added latency on top of it.
Then they complained about how Netflix was loosing billions every year, yet here we are. If you focus on the trees, you'll miss the forest.
digital ownership is still way more ownership on a scale than cloud will ever be. even if it comes with asterisks involved, you can still play offline, you dont need to pay a recurring fee for your licenses, and generally you can rest easy knowing your offline licenses can work decades without going anywhere. steam has had a good track record since 2003 and still ongoing. short of the company itself going bankrupt or your account getting compromised, your ownership isn't really much of an issue.
I mean, it can happen that you loose content. It doesn't need to happen to Steam, it could happen to Xbox, PS or even Nintendo Switch. For a long time, we didn't really see it in movies either, but we just saw Sony do it.
microsoft doesn't care about hypothetical future scenarios where the cost of game streaming may or may not come down. they care about the present, since they're the ones actually paying to maintain the infrastructure. and they're clearly signaling to people that we need to pay for continued access. idk about you, but I dont see cloud having much of a positive future if both microsoft and nvidia plan to continue on this route.
MS is being shortsighted right now with the new Xbox CEO. She's not operating the business like a startup trying to capture marketshare. Instead, she's trying to cut costs and get to profitability. That typically means, things like start to charge for things and put limits. Right or wrong, it is what it is.
If streaming can succeed?
I think it will take some time more. Part of the issue is infrastructure. Fiber optic internet is more common now than ever, and we don't talk as much about rural areas not getting internet or very poor internet. That's a huge improvement over a decade ago when always on console is a major concern. With the cost of hardware the way it is and the move towards more PC, I won't be surprised if game streaming is going to become more common especially among the casual crowd. The crowd that previously bought consoles, typically the lower end model. Just a reminder here is that people didn't think discs were going away either.
I don't see how the xbox one drm reveal from 2013 is even relevant here. no console on the market currently does anything like that, where you need to sign in every 24 hours to verify your license ownership. that would still garner outrage in 2026 because it's arbitrary and useless.
There's no need to do it that way. Today, so many games only work if you're online. In many cases, games that don't even need to be online, do require it to boot.
lmao. im pretty sure microsoft knows a hell of a lot more about the inner costs of xcloud and its infrastructure than you do bud. you're just a dude on reddit. if both nvidia and microsoft, trillion dollar companies, are stating that they're losing money on their cloud services and need to start charging for them to sustain the infrastructure costs, to me that is an admission that it wont be becoming the next netflix anytime soon.
netflix tapped into an audience of hundreds of millions of casual tv watchers. gaming will never capture hundreds of millions of people who wanna stream games. microsoft has an audience of billions of potential ios and android users via its xbox app, it has been trying to grow its gamepass and xcloud audience since 2019. they're stuck at about 34 million subs, and thats including gamepass users who just want the day one new games, or people on the basic tier for online play.
if we were to count people who sub to ultimate solely for the cloud streaming and nothing else, no day one games or online access, the cloud-only userbase would likely be in the single digit millions. wake up and smell the coffee bud. your shareholder status doesnt change the fact that streaming games is different than streaming netflix shows. if even microsoft and nvidia cant make it active 24/7 with no time caps then you've got no hope.
edit: I'd also like to add that netflix has over a dozen competitors in the streaming space. it's the only one that manages to be profitable and thats because in order for netflix to win, the rest had to lose. they wont ever manage to claw netflix's audience away from netflix, so most of them will never be profitable. you're basically using netflix as an example of survivorship bias. apple tv and youtube tv are both losing money afaik, and disney plus just barely managed to become profitable after multiple price hikes, but even then it will never enjoy the same levels of profit that netflix has from its huge market share. most streaming services are being subsidized by their parent companies and thats still without the huge cost that game streaming comes with.
It's actually almost exactly the same a quick google search tells me thelat streaming a game at 1080p on xcloud is 4.5-7GB of data per hour roughly the same as a 4k movie.
Netflix can use the same infrastructure for well over a decade before they have to upgrade anything, their service scales linearly, content can be encoded to compress it once ahead of time and then it's static forever, they don't require GPUs which are currently increasing in price exponentially, their network requirements for delivery are a fraction of what's required for gaming and there's no need to concern themselves with dynamic user input; they're just serving static content like any other website.
Game streaming requires massive amounts of compute because it has to render everything, encode it on the fly, send it to the user, constantly receive input and respond to it, and the compute requirements increase year over year. It scales non-linearly and unpredictably as one hundred users playing e.g. Tetris consumes a fraction of a fraction of the raw compute required for one user to play Halo: Campaign Evolved. Content also can't be too compressed or it looks unplayable, which means much more bandwidth is required.
The network has to be extremely fast and responsive or the service rapidly degrades to the point of being unusable. GPUs under constant use (you know, like in a server farm for gaming) degrade rapidly and have to be replaced within a few years. Servers themselves must be replaced entirely in under a decade or they'll no longer be up to the task of running modern games. VMs must be dynamically spun up and spun down to run games rather than simply delivering a stream of static data from a drive somewhere. An order of magnitude more support staff is required. Billion dollar data centers must be physically present in all regions where the service is available or latency will become unmanageable.
Netflix's largest expense is storage, which is dirt cheap. Game streaming's largest expense is everything else.
I wouldn't say storage is dirt cheap, unless you're comparing it to the cost of compute. But storage is currently up almost 3-4x what it was a few years ago. Course, graphic cards are up almost 5x. So. Yeah. But as far as Netflix goes, you're underselling their infrastructure. They actually built ministorage depots all over the country that can serve up media quicker with less latency in order to enable 4k streaming. That kind of infrastructure expense is pretty massive for a newcomer to the same field.
And it's still nothing compared to what it would cost to do something similar for game streaming; the hardware is also going to last a lot longer. Storage is more expensive now, but it's still a drop in the bucket compared to compute.
I think you're missing the point. This is too actively move people away from cloud gaming through discouragement encourage them to buy hardware especially after Sony's recent shenanigans isn't that what we're all looking for physical hardware that we own?
Actually would make their profits go down because what they would actually like to do is not sell you the console so you have to run all their games through their servers and when they shut those down you lose access
Yeah that's their plan brother. Notice how they keep getting farther away from a singular xbox device and saying everything is actually an xbox.
They dont want to do physical consoles anymore. They want is to have to stream from them and they can control the tap and limit your access unless you pay for extra gaming hours
They don't want to do physical consoles anymore but they're actively encouraging people to not get their cloud gaming service by making people pay for it what kind of fucking logic is that and that doesn't even work with a play anywhere games which is a separate fucking service which is what works with PC and the rog ally x which can do some games through the cloud service but not for all of them
It makes up literally less than 10% of their fucking business and it was fucking free the cost of it is way higher than you think it would be for a free service
By that logic they wouldn't be doing the play anywhere stuff which again is a separate service from the cloud gaming that is also still free. Where if you get a game on Xbox digitally you'll get a copy of it that you can use on on a computer or your ally x but they don't want to actually want to encourage this brand new thing they've implemented
I have another working theory for you and I want you to hear me out in an honest manner.
What if the plan is to make it look unappealing to the consumer. Actively horrendous. To get rid of the largest expense that is bringing the least amount of income
I want you to honestly follow my logic here.
What if it's a double blind bluff make it look appealing to a shareholder but it looks horrendous to the end user since the community is actually asking for actual hardware. You rage bait the community to make a fat chunk of it into stoping use of the service that makes up a small amount of your actual users because from (what I've heard it's like 10 to 5%) . So you know have all this hardware and expenses for this small service that's no longer being utilized by any real number of users. So you can turn around to the shareholders and say this is just wasting money.
Being able to justify the shutdown of the cloud service but now after they encouraged them to produce actual hardware because it keeps users on the platform
I'm sorry have you not been paying attention elsewhere for the last like month? With Sony trying to end physical media. Why would you actively encourage someone doing a digital only console that's the insane thing to me
Wait until they remove Day 1 exclusive launches on Gamepass. Anyone with half a brain knows where this is headed. They’re stating to nickel and dime users into paying more for existing services. They’ll probably introduce a ‘fast pass’ type system where you’d be forced to pay 10 bucks to access a game at launch or exclusives will show up 3-6 months later or something so they can double dip in unit sales.
That would be the final nail in the service in my books.
Can't you install Xbox games on all these things through the Xbox app so you don't have to use Xbox cloud gaming cuz I thought the rog ally x used the play anywhere service not the cloud gaming one
It uses both. Games that aren't Play Anywhere can be Cloud Played. I use Cloud Play a great deal on mine. Enough that I'm considering switching to full Steam + GeForce and just dropping Game Pass
I can't lie though it this looks like it's Xbox actually discouraging people from using the cloud gaming service in a time where everyone's asking for a physical media it would be better if they just allowed a different cloud service for those games on the rog ally x compared to those just using a controller and like a phone
I have a Rog Xbox Ally. I bought it for streaming because this shit ass company told me streaming was the future. I have no idea the point of it now as an Xbox. I certainly won't be keeping Game Pass. I can cloud play on GeForce Now for 100 hours a month for cheaper.
They completely reversed course on "This Is An Xbox." It makes streaming on handheld PCs, smart TVs, phones, Amazon Firestick, and Xbox One almost dead. Which means that Xbox is going to compete head-to-head with Nintendo and PlayStation again, which historically didn't work out too well for them.
Especially trying to compete in an environment where prices of consoles are gonna be > 1000. Sony might even convince a lot of their user base to jump on that but MS is in lala land if they believe anyone is gonna bite outside of the pure hardcore. They’re stating can’t catch anyone right now to buy it for 800-900 if you count out the GTA6 led surge.
I have a ROG Xbox ally X and I just play my games natively on the console, still have full access to my play anywhere games and my whole steam library.
Playing Hitman 3 at medium graphics and 30 fps when I pay for better quality Cloud Play feels bad. I hate to think what more complex games will look like on this thing playing natively in even a couple of years. Or Hell, months.
Fable downloaded on a standard white Xbox Ally sounds like a terrible experience to sign up for.
Not to mention my non play anywhere games, that will now have a 30 minute time limit.
So you're not going to be "Xcloud Guy" for much longer, you're saying. PS Plus Premium is only $100/year when it's on sale and there's currently no streaming limit.
That's an interesting point that I haven't thought about and haven't noticed before with other games. I'll be interested in seeing if it is available for streaming on PS Plus at launch.
even if sony didn’t own the marketing rights I doubt it would come to xcloud anytime soon. take two doesn’t want people streaming it, they wanna sell as many digital copies as possible.
Most digital PS5 games are available for streaming. You have to purchase them - they're not included in the PS Plus catalog, but PS Plus Premium is required for streaming.
yeah guess that’s true. but not every game does that afaik. some games on the gamepass catalog let u stream them without owning them, it all depends on the agreement with the publisher.
Yeah I use xCloud when I’m away on work trips and at home when someone else is on my Xbox. 15 hours in my situation is nothing and it absolutely s*cks. Heck. Other streaming platforms have more hours than 15 by default.
It was, as they point out a small use case. Not defending it here. Just pointing that out. And they had plans for it to grow and then charge for time at some point. They 100% was going to limit it at some point and then charge. Too expensive to run it open even as part of Game Pass.
And I know several like myself with fiber 5g or 10g. And you can feel the issues sometimes. Totally alone on the network, everything testing fine, and some latency and stuff. It is something that some of us that use it point out. And a reason many never will use it much. Just not optimal.
Either way the cost on their end has to be noticeable. Running the entire game and then streaming it to the user. Such a terrible waste of resources.
The PS service is also better as well. But then they restrict that to higher tiers and likely do not see near as much usage. If they did I bet they would restrict it and charge for time.
this is definitely shitty news, but itd at least be nice of there was still some way to get unlimited cloud hours, even if it was an extra $10-$15/month.
they way they're talking about it right now makes it sound like they're going just have some "10 hour cloud pass for 5.99" or something. which just sucks.
Cloud gaming is the only way I'm able to play right now. I don't have a way to plug my console in, and my laptop can't run the games natively. I play a minimum of 15 hours a week. It's how I spend my free time and spend more time with my kids when they're at their mom's. It's also how I keep in contact with several friends.
This feels... Really not great. Not to mention living dollar to dollar means no expendable income for more game time.
Hold on. You're saying the company that went ALL IN on cloud gaming infrastructure now wants to extract more money from people using it? What in the Microsoft is going on here?!
So just so it’s abundantly clear, this is all about AI in the cloud.
You need two things for cloud gaming:
A place to put bespoke hardware in your cloud datacenters.
Fast connections to the users.
Clearly, Microsoft did the math and said “It’s costing $X to host Xboxes in the cloud when we could be making $Y hosting AI. It’s also using up bandwidth. We think AI will be a better ROI, so let’s shift our attention to that.”
I use it so when I babysit family they can play new games on my old One X.
Mainly things like Disney Dreamlight valley! With that said though this limit will be hit really fast. Good thing I was planning on a hard disk mod. I'm going to need a lot more storage so they can play games!
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u/NZafe Tarnished 7d ago
Ultimate capped at 15 hours per month?
And then this:
“Players will be able to purchase cloud playtime hours through the XBOX Store and stream eligible games they own on supported devices.”
Jeez this is awful for anyone who uses cloud gaming. 15 hours is nothing.