- cross-posted to:
- pcmasterrace@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- pcmasterrace@lemmy.world
Game Pass Ultimate: 15 hours / month
Game Pass Premium: 10 hours / month
Game Pass Essential: 5 hours / month
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.
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Wow those rates are outright stupid. Someone looked at those numbers and decided that was a good idea. Are they braindead or are they hoping for this to fail?
I think they’re hoping to make a profit off of what they’re charging rather than loss leading.
At some point you gotta offer a decent product if you want people to use it, let alone make a profit off it.
To my eye, all of the moves Xbox has made lately is to package up something that someone else can afford to buy off of Microsoft’s hands, and that includes selling them a subscription service that brings in more money than it costs. That’s only conjecture, but it seems to fit.
Sorry, but why does someone would pay for this? Being limited in playtame AND over a $/h? There are shure enough people who opt in… or still not opt out after this…
Because this is more like a side benefit to Game Pass. Most people are playing locally, not cloud.
Play has no limi… oh…
I’m glad my homegirl fitgirl doesn’t limit my play time.
Hey the thing everyone expected cloud/streaming gaming to do happened!.. I sadly thought it wouldn’t until mid 2027 or 2028
5 hours of gameplay…a month. 10 hours…a month.
What even is this service for?
Creating shareholder value
Is that per game? It has to be right?
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 miss playing in Arcades.
Wait no, not like that!
Haha. At least you can play as long as you have skills. Well games were a bit unfair, but that’s another story. Yeah, I’m glad we don’t have pay to win anymo… oh… never mind.
We understand lmao
WE DESIGNED FOR IT
Literally turning Xbox cloud gaming into gacha. Well done lol
I love that they don’t mention how much the additional playtime will cost
one-billion-dollars.jpg (png delivery requires ultimate subscription).
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.
Oh my gosh OnLive. I had almost forgotten.
I just can’t believe SO many people are blowing their money on it, if it truly will only effect 4% of users.
More like, “Of their Game Pass users, very few use the cloud gaming feature, and even fewer of them would exceed these limits.”
So if you partake in egregiously long gaming sessions of one (1) hour per day, the best plan they have runs out in half a month.
Lmao.
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.
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.
Kinect my beloved
@scrubbles @Prox I May Say something really bad about Microsoft approach to life, so I won’t
Now I’m wondering if this might not have happened if the RAM crisis never happened.
They have a lot of upkeep on the backend hardware so people can use these services. As server costs go up, it’s likely they’re now strongly motivated to kill the appeal of their own service. In another future where hardware costs were still reasonable, maybe they would’ve let it go.
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. 😬
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.Nintendo:
I’d say this should herald a surge in PC gaming, but … well, no one can afford PC hardware any more.
Microsoft: “We are under no obligation to refund you your tariff overpayments.”
Also Microsoft:
Little too soon to attempt to slam the gates shut, no?
I just wanna go back to the time where games were offline by default and couldn’t be updated after release…
You had me up until “couldn’t be updated after release.”
Why? It made it really important for developers and publishers to release a polished game that worked on day one, because if you fucked up, you’d have to recall the cartridges or discs for replacement.
And you know what you bought would keep working, wouldn’t require a patch or download if you used it in another game console, decades after, without needing anything but a functional cartridge/disc+console, even if the publisher/developer/console maker doesn’t exist anymore.
You’ve got some rose coloured nastalgia glasses on, methinks. Games were not always polished to a shine, and they certainly were not bug free. Watch any speedrun of retro games of you think that’s true.
Updates allow for improvements over time. I think that post release updates for games have been way more of a pro than a con in the grand scheme.
My much bigger issue is server side connections being required for things.
Yeah it definitely wasn’t all perfect, but at least major bugs were ironed out before launch. I don’t mind the glitch here and there, what bothers me is the quality of games when they release, some are truely pushed out to be sold way too early because the worst thing that can happen is a bit of bad press.