Microsoft Slaps Hours Limits On Xbox Game Pass Cloud Gaming
from the death-knell dept
There’s enshittification, and then there’s enshittification. Allow me to give you an example of each. For what we’ll call enshittification classic, there’s Xbox’s Game Pass service. A mere two years ago, Microsoft made all kinds of changes to Game Pass to coincide with a serious slowdown of subscriber adoption. Those changes included doing away with previous service tiers, introducing new tiers that came in at higher prices, the removal of day-1 access to first party titles for some of the tiers and some hardware even at those higher prices. So, Microsoft shifted the offering for Game Pass in a way that made it cost significantly more, while providing less value.
But for the next tier of enshittification, there’s… Xbox’s Game Pass service. If you thought the devaluing of the service the last go around was shitty, wait until you get a load of Microsoft’s plan to slap an hours limit for its cloud gaming onto those same subscriptions.
Microsoft has announced big changes to Xbox cloud gaming, including a switch to monthly hour limits. From November, Game Pass plans will include a set number of cloud gaming hours each month:
- Game Pass Ultimate: 15 hours
- Game Pass Premium: 10 hours
- Game Pass Essential: 5 hours
Now, if confronted, Microsoft has a couple of things to say about all of this and why you shouldn’t worry about it. First, anyone that exhausts their subscription hours can, you guessed it, simply buy more. Want to engage in as much cloud gaming as you did before? No problem! Fork over even more money than the already raised tier prices and you can go right ahead.
Second, and this is where I’ll engage in some blatant speculation, Microsoft said these changes will barely effect anyone at all.
The change means those who use cloud gaming most via Game Pass will end up having to pay more, although Microsoft said this impacts 4% of Game Pass subscribers.
See? It’s only 4% of subscribers that will run out of these tiered hours. Where does my speculation come in? Oh, simple: I think Microsoft is full of shit on that number. What informs that speculation? Oh, simple: Microsoft also says more people are engaging in cloud gaming and playing it for longer periods of time.
In a blog post, Microsoft said it was making the changes because the cost of providing cloud gaming has grown as more people use it and play for longer. The monthly limits, Microsoft continued, will mean it can invest in reliability and performance.
So, to summarize, Microsoft had to put in these hours limits because more and more people are gaming in the cloud for longer and longer amounts of time… but those limits are no big deal because very few people game long enough to exhaust those hours? I’m no mathematician, but I don’t think those two statements can exist in the same reality.
What’s really driving all of this is a combination of the predictable enshittification process tech offerings like this tend to travel down and the explosion in cost of the hardware needed to run the backend of it all, thanks to the adoption of A.I. platforms. And, hey, those rising additional costs to Microsoft are very real.
But so is the reduction in value of Game Pass as a result of all of this. Cloud gaming is likely the future of gaming. But I’m no longer sure Game Pass is going to be a player in that future.
Filed Under: cloud gaming, enshittification, gamepass, streaming games, subscription, tiers, video games, xbox
Companies: microsoft
Comments on “Microsoft Slaps Hours Limits On Xbox Game Pass Cloud Gaming”
What kind of “ultimate” gamer plays less than 15 hours a month? I’m guessing many gamers would exhaust a 5-hour limit in one day. Microsoft are sending a clear signal here: cloud gaming is not to be taken seriously.
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As a point of comparison, the original Game Boy could run for 15-30 hours on a set of batteries.
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It’s not 15 hours of gaming a month. It’s 15 hours of cloud gaming.
Last I heard, Game Pass subscriptions include letting players download games to run on their local hardware. Making it easy to game heavily with 0 hours of cloud gaming per month.
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Okay, so… what, it’s a game rental service that just happens to include a sampler for a cloud gaming service? But to what end, if one can no longer subscribe to that service in any useful sense? Why even bother advertising that one tier offers triple the cloud gaming time, when all the limits are laughably short? If it’s meant for people to just briefly try out one or two games per month before maybe buying, the publishers would be better off releasing small shareware downloads for free.
I can’t help but be reminded of the early 1990s, when network access was charged at an hourly rate. Going onto CompuServe was almost like making a long distance call, with the parents constantly watching the clock (“make it quick! they’re billing by the minute”). That ended pretty quickly once competitors went unlimited, because nobody wanted to be rushed that way. Perhaps Micro-Soft will bring back the idea of on-peak and off-peak hours, and “10-10” codes to connect to a competitor’s cheaper “interexchange” data center.
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My point here is that when Microsoft says this will only affect 4% of game pass subscribers I can believe them. Because they are including a lot of people who won’t touch cloud gaming in that 96%.
From memory, it was a game rental service first. Cloud gaming came later, probably with the “this is an Xbox” marketing.
15 hours a WEEK let alone month is nothing for a beast like me. I of course also have a very beefy home setup so everything (even the LLMs) get run locally, not on someone’s server. IMO these services only seem useful for the “try before you buy” crowd who are unwilling to sail the high seas.
Everyone is a 4 percenter!
60% of the time, it works every time!
The math maths
Not defending Microsoft, but their statement holds up. I’m sure they don’t want to buy more hardware to run their cloud gaming anyway, but right now, it’s going to be extremely expensive for them to do so. They might even be using the same hardware for cloud gaming as they are for their other services, like AI, so the amount of capacity might be decreasing. Which isn’t an excuse, but since they’re not going to add more capacity, it means they have a flat amount of game time to go around. So if you have more people using the service, because, for example, the price of an Xbox or a good gaming PC has gone up dramatically, somehow, you’re going to end up rationing the service, either implicitly or explicitly.
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That is a good point.
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But 5-15 hours of play a month is like a World War Two level of rationing. If they want to kill the service, they could at least be honest about it.
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Are you implying that Microsoft, the $3.7T company that has invested $300B in AI data centers so far and bought Activision for $69B, cannot afford to build a decent data center for could gaming to save the Xbox brand?
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There was no such implication, and the comment specifically phrased it as “they don’t want to”. Another way to say it is that there’s probably some executive whose bonus is tied to not spending this money (which might be rough for any employee whose bonus is tied to the service’s popularity—but that’s their problem, and I guess the problem of the soon-to-be-former subscribers).
If only someone could find a way to shoehorn “Copilot” into this service, though, it’d probably get the near-infinite budget you’re alluding to.
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Here’s a way to get Agentic AI (for the extra CPU consumption) into Microsoft gaming:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-vega/
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They caused every problem they have.
They want subscribers, they get them, then they complain like an overbooked airline or a 2000s cable internet provider.
Hardware is expensive? Guess who one of the assclown outfits who made hardware so fucking expensive is?
Their capacity is their problem. Sorry they were so successful with their bullshit.
However. Changing the terms of the deal after the sale (people who already paid for a year) is utter bullshit.
Whether the math maths out after the fact is irrelevant to the premise.
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Yes, and if MS insist on sticking with this plan, I hope they get a lot of chargebacks from those people who paid in advance. Although, for all I know, those might be processed by some other department that doesn’t talk to this one, such that nobody’s in a position to identify or do anything about the connection.
Anyway, the problem of people who pre-paid for a year will be gone in a year—whether MS honor those deals or not—and only the problem of a service enshittified to the point of near-uselessness will remain. Any “good” manager will have used that time to escape the blame, and some other manager will be able to take credit for shutting down the now-unprofitable service—a win-win!
This job would be great if it wasn’t for all the fucking customers.
If only Microsoft could identify the people responsible for making cloud services and computing in general considerably more expensive to run! If only they could do something about those bandits! Their hands are tied, really, they had to impose caps that make the service useless without handing over more money.
I gave up on Microsoft when they started the mandatory accounts for windows to work products. Windows 7 was the last time they made an operating system that didn’t offend me.
Blizzard Games
MS own Blizzard, meaning WoW, Starcraft, Diablo 4. Are games solely / mainly aimed at online / multiplayer gaming part of this? Or does MS have plans to move that stable of games in under this?
lol there goes my sub ¯_(ツ)_/¯ this is just money back in my pocket. Thanks (and go f*** yourselves) Microsoft!
As others have pointed out these limits only apply to cloud gaming. However, that’s missing the point. These passes were sold as unlimited, now Microsoft is changing the terms of the sale after the fact. There are people who paid for a year upfront, thinking they’re getting unlimited access, now they are being screwed. I doubt Microsoft will be offering refunds to those people.
There was an interesting interview published just yesterday with a gentleman who has worked on video games under Microsoft’s thumb for a long long time. The interview is mainly about Battletech, but there’s a lot of interesting info in there about the state of the video game industry in general and why things are the way they are. This bit stuck out to me:
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I’m not sure I follow the logic. “Cloud” gaming in the sense of running games on remote hardware, transferring only controller input and audio-visual output, is obvious bullshit, sure, but there’s no need for subscriptions to work that way. A console could access data online just as it’d acccess data on disc, except with modern connections it’d be faster than any disc ever was. And the data could be cached on a local SSD, which would be financially good for Microsoft in terms of bandwidth. (Netflix, by contrast, has to send new data all the time.)
In Microsoft’s role as a publisher, people stick with games longer than they stick with movies or television shows, which presumably means publishers have less pressure to produce new things than Netflix does. As to the user’s financial position, if they manage to beat each game in a few months and don’t care about ownership, they’ll have come out ahead, right?
Of course, it doesn’t make any actual sense to download game data and then be forced to delete it. That’s all based around the artificial scarcity of copyright, and the inability of the user to control the hardware they own. But most people haven’t yet figured that out; Netflix would be dying, too, if they had.
Yet another generational problem.
When I was a teenager, I saw someone playing the original DOOM on PC. I’d never seen a computer do such a thing! I thus borrowed from someone a free-as-in-beer shareware CD with a legal, non-crippled, time-unlimited copy of DOOM’s first episode. It took some twiddling of
CONFIG.SYSto make DOOM run on a Pentium with 4 MiB RAM, but I soon got it going at home—much to my parents’ dismay. I then purchased a CD-ROM with the full version; it had no copy protection whatsoever.Although I’m admittedly not much of a gamer, that experience was unforgettable—as were some other idgames I then purchased in the next few years—as was, eh, a collectable box with another copy of the original DOOM, bought just ’coz this bit-for-bit identical copy came with a T-shirt,
iddogtags, and a cute little statue of a Cyberdemon.Although my DOOM CDs were lost in a disaster, and I lament the loss of my pet Cyberdemon, I still have somewhere a backup copy of my two legally purchased copies of original DOOM. If desired (and if I can find it, LOL), I could run it unmodified in a VM with FreeDOS—or I could use the proprietary, legally-non-redistributable WAD data files with the wadless GPL Linux DOOM.
For any beancounters wondering how such lenity was a viable business plan: DOOM’s lead programmer, John Carmack, was already famous for collecting Ferraris bought with his profit cut of sales of DOOM.
Earth to Gen Z gamers: Please do not accept being treated like shit by corporations who want your money. Vote with your wallet.
I’m sadly unsurprised when people accept enshittified cars, home appliances, etc., etc. But games are a purely discretionary purchase. The more discretionary the spending, the easier it is for consumers to revolt. Do the masses of customers who grew up in an enshittified world even realize this?
PROTIP for the beancounters. For enhanced profits, I suggest a revolutionary new business paradigm for your enterprise:
???(No question marks here.)Radical, I know. (IANAMBA.)
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It’s a shockingly good model from an age where crap quality and planned obsolescense were already deeply rooted in the economy.
I'm sorry, what?
I don’t understand why you would believe that. It seems to me that cloud gaming mostly appeals to a mythical market segment of “people who can’t or won’t shell out money for a console or a PC, but also refuse to play games that can run on their phone.” A game on the far end of a network connection is never going to be as reliable as one you downloaded locally, and the ability to play games that are more graphically-intensive than your device can handle doesn’t really make up for that (especially once the network gets congested and your video stream gets dropped down to 480p).
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Microsoft will make it the future of gaming, because what the hell else is society gonna do with all these surplus datacenter graphics cards when the A.I. bubble crashes?
(Shortly thereafter it’ll be the past of gaming, but never mind that. As with dumb terminals, these ideas re-appear every so often.)