Microsoft has announced new time limits are being placed on Xbox Cloud Gaming via Game Pass, tightening the belts on gamers that choose to use this feature, as the company cites rising server costs.
From November, the following monthly time limits will be put in place:
- Game Pass Ultimate: 15 hours
- Game Pass Premium: 10 hours
- Game Pass Essential: 5 hours
Further gaming time will be able to be purchased separately, and that will also be a route to play games bought through Xbox, doing so via Cloud Gaming without having a Game Pass subscription.
What this does mean is that the old narrative that Xbox Cloud Gaming could be a meaningful alternative to a console or PC is effectively dead. Having spent years building out Cloud Gaming, bundling it into Game Pass and getting Xbox Cloud Gaming apps onto TVs and handheld PCs, now you’ll barely have enough time to complete the 14 hour Gears of War E-Day campaign within a Game Pass Ultimate monthly allowance. Sure, they might “be an Xbox”, but not for very long.
This relegates Xbox Cloud Gaming to a nice to have fallback when away from home. Though it already seems that this is exactly how gamers have been using it, with Microsoft saying that they expect roughly 4% of subscribers to be affected. That’s still maybe around 1.2 million of the reported 30 million Game Pass subscriber pool.
Microsoft says that that are “introducing this model because the cost of providing cloud gaming grows as more people use it and play for longer. 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.”
Once again, we can easily blame Microsoft spaffing so much time and money on servers for generative AI, similar to rising console costs because of RAM, but that doesn’t necessarily track when Cloud Gaming runs on specially designed servers using adapted Xbox Series chipsets. It’s possible that Microsoft has shrunk the gaming server pool as Game Pass subscriber counts and usage haven’t met expectations from half a decade ago (especially with Apple immovable on allowing game streaming apps into the iOS app store) and this goes hand-in-hand with with the rising running costs of the Azure cloud infrastructure.
All the more reason to look after your home consoles.
Source; Xbox
