Xbox wants you to pay 24 to 40 cents per hour to stream games you already bought: Time-based a la carte charges come on top of the purchase price for the games themselves.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2026/10/xbox-wants-you-to-pay-24-to-40-cents-per-hour-to-stream-games-you-already-bought/Open linkView original on lemmy.world
206 replies
Iirc One of the previous heads of xbox said that they're intentionally trying to kill the xbox brand over time by enshittyfying it (or words to that effect).
This might very wel be that. They know damn well this will piss people off.
What is the end goal of killing Xbox? Not having to deal with consoles and just concentrate on computers?
I don't know. I mean I wouldn't put it past themto try and merge the whole gaming experience into the Windows ecosystem. We all know what geniuses they are doubling down on the whole slop ridden W11 thing.
This would be so dumb... and at the same time so possible!
Execs totally disconnected from the players base having no damn clue how they're going to react.
Players are going to be so pissed they're much less likely to buy anything through MS ever again, but that won't compute in an exec's mind.
That sounds like some exec thought it would work. Maybe they saw the success of steam and want a piece of that pie without having to put out hardware? I might be too old to understand, but if that's the future of console gaming, I don't want a part of it.
Where is the line for gamers? They think you’re marks.
Once again, I pray for the time when China floods the market with GPUs, RAM, and storage to the point where all these technocapitalists get fucked.
Fuck renting shit.
If they did that, the technocapitalists would just make Chinese hardware illegal.
"Would?" They're already doing that.
So much for free markets, eh? More like, we’ll invade or sanction whoever to have freedom in their markets, but the instant our markets can’t compete, all of a sudden regulation is good.
If Americans cannot get their treats and the bread and Circus stops, then they will resort to other means of expressing dissent.
The USA is highly individualistic and materialistic. If they can't get their treats, then stochastic crime will take place (not that I'm against that, fuck capital).
I totally agree, which is another reason we should not expect China to save us. Their ideal world is one where Americans finally take power from the capitalist class.
My ideal world is that but we immediately also start to undermine the Chinese as well through decentralized production and logistics so good it makes over seas shipping too expensive. Mind you I want that for the entire world, you cannot fathom the arousal I feel at the idea of a Trans-Berringia trains bridge to connect the logistics of the old and new world, also the Trans-African rail should be completed to such an extent that goods in the Congo are as cheap as goods in LA.
That's my ideal world too though. You say that like it's a bad thing.
Yes, it’s also my ideal world. Sorry if I came across as pro-capitalist 🤮
Exactly. And they will use the excuse that the chinese hardware might spy on us, all while the hardware they allow us to buy is doing that openly.
Classic
They did it, they made something worse than google Stadia!
wanting and getting dont always happen
game streaming. Can no one read?
And we've come full circle back to arcades. Just with extra(fewer?) steps now.
They didn't used to make us buy the arcade machine first.
Very true. Gotta think of those shareholders and make it more expensive somehow.
Whatever. I would never allow an Xbox in my house. When they came out it was obviously just another shit product from a shit company. Hard pass.
The upside is hopefully it will just continue to alienate their market.
Halo 2 on Xbox was kind of a blast. But otherwise yeah
More like a phenomenon. Things come and go though. I don't play games anymore; I don't even know what's popular.
Halo died a long time ago when I was still playing. Halo: Reach felt like the start of its decline.
Back in my day it was called an arcade video game.
Except you didn't have to buy your own arcade machine before you started shoveling quarters into it.
Yeah, back in my day the games came on a cassette tape. Sometimes the tapes got tangled up or broke, but when you bought it, you owned it.
Oh, and you'd get those magazines with pages of code for a game - you'd spend a day typing it in and never be able to figure out the tiny error you'd made.
Actually, games are so much better these days. It's just unfortunate that capitalism.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8ju_10NkGY
tell microsoft to eat itself its time hopefully microsoft turns from a 5b company to 0 dollars in time.
Not that I dont share your sentiment. But Microsoft market cap is as of right now 3.9 Trillion. Not 5 billion.
This has been a successful business model for mmos for decades. This is not new.
Not really, the MMO model is ppm not ppp.
The gamepass subscription already fits the MMO model.
It's quite similar. Pay for a game and then pay for game "time.". Mmos are a pre pay, this is likely billed after playing. But really just paying for time after buying the game.
Well that would explain why I've never seen an MMO streamer before. At least not since Leeroy.
Your playing for cloud computing which as never been free very misleading headline
It's already part of the monthly fee. They are now tacking on an additional charge. It thought it was pretty clear.
Isn't this just free on both pc and playstation?
The consumer will gobble this up like hot bread and then ask "but why things bad? Must be immigrants"
Shitty behaviour by a shitty species
You underestimate how much people don't like metered charges.
as a paperspace user i read the first part as 'oh nice' ... then i kept reading. i'll keep paying 0.76USD/hr. i don't have time to justify paying for a gaming pc... especially now. so paperspace has been great when i want to play a high end game. my library, mods. but yeah... m$ hell bent on destroying their company for copilot.
They can have my longest finger while I game on Cachy
Man, I feel like peak gaming was the xbox 360.
I think steam deck 2 as and when it comes out will be a golden age. I think it stands a chance to completely consolidate the market.
Depends on the price, most people don't want a 1k euros console.
I'd argue early PC and 3rd-4th gen (NES to SNES era)
>laughs in piracy
And it's this kind of shit that has ruined my love for tech. It's all soulless dystopian slop they want you paying for monthly for the rest of your life. Fuck all these techno dweebs. It's a shame all the normies will go along with this...
They'll average $1700/year to play the fucking games they already spent $100 to borrow indefinitely? Fuck, gaming sounds so stupid now.
$1700/yr is 12 hours of gaming each day at $0.40/hr, which is more than the $0.24 you'd actually be paying. Nobody gaming that much would otherwise be spending $100/yr on games in any case.
This is a very stupid thing for the industry, but your numbers are hyperbolic and anti-useful.
ah but what about the hardware rental fees
Let's say you play a game that costs 40c to stream, and it's every day for a year; it will be ~400$
For 2-3 hours per day is what you mean I guess?
Because 400 is pretty close to the amount of days in a year, meaning you would have a bit more than a buck per day.
Yeah, and the shit is that it is 0.24 to 0.40, not just 0.24
If you refer to the article, it's price tiering. You would be consistently paying $0.24.
"Indefinitely", huh? They can just rent it forever? Sounds like a missed opportunity for shareholders, I bet we can get that line even higher
Indefinitely just means unspecified. Could be 3000 years, could be 15 minutes; it implies "until further notice" depending on the whims of the noticer. See "suspended indefinitely" in crime drama shows, where they're back on payroll by the end of the episode
That's why you ditch consoles, get a PC and buy only from stores that don't do this rubbish.
Tech is still great but you have to know where to look and invest. Sony/MS have lost the plot that's for sure, but the pc gaming ecosystem is vibrant, and there are amazing foss solutions to just about everything, including streaming.
Go along? They'll be zealots demanding everyone get on board, just like heavily exploited console players are today.
https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2026/07/23/game-streaming-ad-supported-xbox-insiders/
Today, we’re starting to test an ad-supported way to stream select games from your library for a limited time, available to XBOX Insiders.
During this test period, XBOX Insiders with an XBOX account will be able to stream games they own for free with ads. Players will have one hour session limits across supported devices and regions.
Here’s what you can expect:
Ads will play before sessions begin.
The core game experience is unchanged.
This is optional. Players can choose other ways to play at any time.
I bought the Xbox x for starfield. Mistakes were made.
Important point of clarification- this is about streaming from the cloud, using an Xbox or GPU in the cloud to play the game. This makes sense as buying the game or not, you are still using cloud resources.
Xbox Remote Play, which runs the game on your home Xbox and streams from your house to wherever you are, is free.
No it doesn't
Well, what you say does, but running games in the cloud doesn't make sense in any logical way except for that that the owner of said cloud will be walking to the bank laughing his ass off
Oh I agree paying to rent a cloud xbox when you have one sitting at home is fucking stupid. A lot of cloud everything is fucking stupid, and I say that as an IT person who's been fighting cloud-itis since the term 'cloud computing' became a thing.
I see this as a feature most people wouldn't actually use.
Only use case I'd have for it is wanting a game to render at higher specs while travelling at like a hotel.
I bought a steam deck for a vacation when it came out. Used it on the flight and that's it. Never played games except at the airport so I was fine rendering at the steam deck.
Idk, I think you're immediately jumping to the conclusions of "they're trying to make us all rent everything", which, while most likely isn't wrong, is also obscuring some potential for "Hey look, I can play less-response-time-intensive xbox games on my fricking phone with good wifi, because of amazing compression technology"
This is an important note, the headline grabbed my attention but isn't entirely accurate.
Ya at current memory and server gpu prices it wouldn't surprise me at all if they aren't even making any money at 40c/hr.
there was something the other day about microsoft having warehouses of GPUs for datacenters that arent even built yet.
They could probably take 1% of those to cover it without any additional costs for them.
They aren't the same GPUs that are in Xboxs. those are nvidia GPUs eg the nv72 or gb300. There's no way to make them compatible with Xbox. Source: my unc works at Microsoft data centers.
Why do they need to be compatible with an Xbox? They could just use the PC version for streaming
Xbox and PC versions aren't exactly 1:1. Plus, those are extremely expensive GPUs to not be selling for top dollar to the AI bros instead.
Edit- I'm leaving out things like architecture, shaders, tensor cores, NVIDIA vs AMD, SXM vs PCI-E, etc.
Not 1:1 sure, but I'm struggling to think of a meaningful difference that would make the PC version an inferior one besides incompetent porting.
Xbox cloud servers are literally 5 motherboards: 1 management board and 4 Xbox ones. Developers can optimize for a single configuration rather than bake in support for multiple ones. Once it works on an Xbox dev kit, it works on all Xboxs including cloud, console, and handheld. SDKs are making that a thing in the past, but it's not perfect.
those GPUs were sold for top dollar to AI bros.
its why microsoft has so many of them, sitting in a warehouse, waiting to be used, for stupid AI bullshit.
They are sitting in the warehouse because there aren't enough other parts (e.g. DIMMs), power, or data centers for them. And as stupid as AI bullshit is, they are paying more than gamers by orders of magnitude.
Fuck Microsoft
Fuck everything about that. Fuck that to hell and back again not a hobbits tale.
Only 50 center per hour, you say? I mean it's only 75 cents, that won't even buy a soda anymore. Who wouldn't pay a dollar an hour to play the games they love?
the idea is to first make people accept the idea, then over time they will increase the price slowly so people dont react too fast.
Xbox Developers: Hell yeah! Playstation is shooting themselves in the foot. All we have to do is sit back and we'll kill it.
Xbox Business : or.... hold my beer.
Oh fuck no.
Microsoft wants to never sell another product to me again? Fine
that is correct.
they don't want to sell.
they want to rent.
this is just another step down that path.
Stopped buying their garbage years ago.
I wonder if XBox realizes that their player base isn't locked into their ecosystem...
And they are certainly far from the only option.
sad to said that, but most players, are locked into their ecosystem. Most people know shit about piracy, linux, or even tinkering with their computer. It's sad, yes.
I would say that's true about Sony and its ecosystem.
Xbox, on the other hand, isn't doing so hot. I'd argue that Microsoft could potentially be heading toward a serious decline in the console market. When a consumer base is pushed hard enough, eventually people start pushing back.
That's why we're seeing PlayStation and Nintendo Switch consoles being jailbroken. It may be a sign that some consumers are tired of being restricted and exploited by the platforms they use.
Xbox has a particularly serious problem: if Microsoft fails to deliver games and experiences that make its ecosystem worthwhile, people will simply move to PlayStation or Nintendo to play video games. They aren't necessarily going to care about Xbox as an entertainment ecosystem if the gaming experience itself isn't compelling.
Microsoft needs to remember that people buy gaming consoles to play games, not to buy into an ecosystem.
Stadia didn't charge to stream, though I suppose if it still existed it probably would by now.
the most shocking thing about stadia is that they released the means to de-fuck the stadia controller so it could be used as a normal pc controller
even more shocking.. it was google
yeah, i should have been more specific, but thats why its so shocking.
I've called this so many times over... It's not just going to be xbox... it's going to be PCs in general, With AI data centers raising up the price on all hardware, They are already making moves in the government on banning routers. The plan is going to be for personal computers and hardware to leave the world. Either price them out of consumer reach or flat out outlaw them. We get thin clients like stadia, Luna etc... Actually having a personal computer capable of running software itself will be considered a national security threat. Why wouldn't you keep your stuff in the cloud where the government can audit it, companies can make sure you aren't pirating or running unapproved illegal LLMs that could make bombs etc...
Ok, whats your answer for all commercial companies without their own data centers then? You think they'd all be happy to give up their computers/laptops as well, or pay so much higher prices in the future?
Running with thin clients for office workers has been default for large corporations for literally decades. Hell it's even done in engineering heavy professions too. It's the entire business model of companies like Citrix, and it's extremely popular.
As for small(er) businesses, no they're probably not going to like it, but they hold little to no sway in the matter, so their opinions don't matter compared to the multi-billion international businesses that fuel this.
And outsourcing IT infrastructure is wildly popular for businesses of all sizes, because it's less hassle and direct management when you just pay a third party to deal with it.
The default? I've never worked for a corporation with thin clients as the main workstation for employees. The only place I worked at with thin clients was a federal government office.
Can't believe this nonsense has so many updoots.
I think you are overestimating just how many big companies use a thin client-like system. But I admit I might be underestimating it. Out of personal experience, I used to work for a pretty big global company and every employee got their own work laptop to use. And that was a company with 30.000+ employees worldwide. So maybe that is my bias in this, and I would think companies like that wouldn't so easily give up their digital sovereignty.
Would you consider that laptop particularly robust? Was your rapid compute power critical to your role?
In my very similar case, the answers were: No and No
A lot of the work I did was subtly cloud-based. If the internet was slow, "local" tasks slowed significantly.
They don't have to give up digital sovereignty. They'lll just subscribe to the Executive plan which grants them more control for cheaper than 30,000 laptops
Oh sweet summer child no it is not. I've spent 25+ years in corporate now. Aside from set situations like BCP we are not using thin clients. They're cumbersome, an absolute bitch to manage, and quite frankly they're shit (underpowered) and not flexible.
Sure you may get some pockets of orgs that use thin clients across the board but I highly doubt it's common.
I work in IT for a large healthcare system that runs its EMR (electronic medical record) entirely through Citrix. So yes, yes we are using thin clients. And so is our largest competitor.
Aren’t anecdotes fun, my sweet summer child? You shouldn’t speak with such authority when you have no idea what you’re talking about.
The initial claim was that thin clients are the "default" for large companies, and yes we can confidently say that's bullshit.
I'm not surprised that healthcare could be an exception, given all the pii that is dealt with there. But thin clients are not the default at most companies.
It's insane how people can't just admit they they're blatantly wrong about something and instead play this gaslighting game where they pretend something is unknowable.
The global size of the thin client market is less than $3 billion. Do you honestly believe that covers most "large corporations" on the planet? I guarantee you that employers with thin clients as the default workstation aren't just a minority, they're a niche market. https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/articles/thin-clients-global-strategic-business-103200706.html
This is the fun thing about The Internet is that neither of us have any idea what we are talking about.
What I can tell you is in finance the use of thin clients is niche and is not a replacement for a laptop/desktop. It's been tried time and time again.
Yes we virtualize applications using Citrix but again those are niche.
Now, healthcare may or may not be a different beast altogether.
Question, how are users accessing EMR. Are they using a thin client workstation for that along with their word, excel, outlook, etc. or are they logging into a portal from their company issued laptop/desktop?
I'm at a hospital right now and everything here is powered off of laptops hooked up to portable physical workstations.
Regardless, I digress. I don't give enough of a shit to care further lol.
I can assure you at least one large US bank uses thin clients extensively.
IDK, in broadcast infrastructure it's thin clients and virtual machines all the way down, and yes it causes tons of problems.
If they aren't rich enough, then they are in the same boat as us. This ain't exactly new... AWS workspaces, Azure Cloud PCs, Google docs, office 365, one drive. The tech has been creeping it's way into businesses for the last 10 years. Obviously they are getting hammered right now by the raise in prices of new PCs. As the prices go up, they will have to make decisions.
My job trialled azure cloud PCs a couple of years ago.
It was pretty good from my point of view as a user.
However the cost was higher than $8000 laptops we have, so we didn't adopt it.
Wonder if it's still the same. Guessing the cloud is still suffering the same hardware price hike anyway.
Yeah I get the feeling a lot of people don't understand how crazy expensive virtualized desktops are.
You really don't go to it to save money. It's for standardization and security and it costs you. Then you're at the mercy of the company anyway. Just witness VMware now.
Running a comparison, assuming it's in use 8 hours a day 5 days a week, looks like a CPC runs around 640-760 a year (just googling quickly checking the numbers). course that's just basic hourly office computer, meant to be comparable to what normally would be normal office computer. Didn't bother to look and see what say an 8,000 high end graphics card laptop or something would compare... of course if your company was doing 8,000 laptops "a couple years ago", those are probably at least 15,000 laptops today.
This is exactly what european digital sovereignity is all about
"Your company data is safe when using our virtual computers." *Wink
And you all think all those companies will just fold their cards and go with it? I don't buy that.
I don't think it's going to be an overnight thing, It will start voluntarily, as the price equation shifts. the complications wasn't worth the savings when office PCs were 1500 a pop, but what about when they are 3000 a pop and projected to hit 5000 next year. After more of them make the switch... then say an announcement can happen that microsoft is lessening it's support for on prem servers and workstations, patches will be less frequent. and now it's a risk assessment as well.
I dont understand the reasoning behind people seem to think prices for components will climb for ever and ever without generating more supply. if RAM becomes obscenely profitable for long enough others will get in on the act and produce their own to get some of those profits. The only reason people arent yet is that everyone thinks there is a bubble pop coming down the pipe (me included).
so the two options are:
Bubble pops-demand from hyperscalers vanishes, prices collapse
Bubble doesn't pop, more supply comes online due to pent up demand, prices stabilize then come down over time
Neither involve cyberpunk dystopias of cackling supervillians monopolizing PCs
Rent-seeking is definitely a sign of a financially-healthy company. Yup. No red flags there.
More than that is a sign that this idea that the next quarter must be always better than the past one cannot work indefinitely.
Rent-seeking is just late stage capitalism. You'll own nothing and you'll be happy.
On top of the purchase price? Yikes, no thank you.
I've never paid a cent to stream anything. There's all kinds of streaming everything that wants me to pay money to stream their shit. Guess what? No.
You can do it now. You'll be able to do it in the future too. Movies, games, makes no difference. There are several lifetimes worth of games you can play without capitulating to the stupid late-stage capitalist bullshit that's going on in this moment.
And it's not always easy. I recently purchased a copy of Max Payne 3, a 14 year old game, because it was on sale for $7. After downloading, I discovered that it required me to register an account with Rockstar to play the single player campaign. I uninstalled it and got it refunded. I intend to pirate it now, out of spite.
Fuck these corporations. Don't contribute to them. There's plenty of other shit to do and there always will be.
Awful idea, but unfortunately completely in character for Microsoft. Windows is basically spyware at this point.
I wonder which high-ranking Microsoft employee made this dumbass decision, knowing it would net them more money
Always has been.
Microsoft has reinvented the arcade, except this time you buy the game first and then feed the machine quarters to play it. Next up: a premium tier that lets you pause without the meter running. At this rate, Xbox’s most profitable game will be watching customers try to escape the billing screen.
Next up: You get a free hour if you watch this AI slop ad. And since we've now required eye tracking to be enabled, if you look away from the ad for even a moment, then pay up.
DRINK VERIFICATION CAN
When the joke greentext becomes the torment nexus...
They had to feed the AI something to give the CEO ideas and all the reputable sites cost money so, really, it's our own fault.
They played too much Roller Coaster Tycoon where they charged an admission fee for the park and then for every single ride too.
This is why I am amassing a library of games and media that can all be consumed locally. The day that becomes the default is the day I stop paying for any of that. I don’t need “the new thing” or “you must watch this”. I have plenty of stuff to keep me entertained till the end of time.
The bitch is going to be components but I’m making sure I can work with things across multiple generations and have spares just in case.
They can want it as much as they like, they can fuck off.
Wow, I almost reflexively downvoted this post just because I hate it so much
Computers could have been so cool, instead they're all just becoming shitty slot machines.
That is just the intro price. Soon with will be $5 an hour and go up from there if you want a "premium" experience.
We all know, this numbers don't look sustainable, it will shittyfi once they have your library hostage.
MS just patented ADS on gameplay....
Yup, it'll be the Disney Fast Pass all over again.
Yeah.... no.
There's no way in Hell.
I will play Archon on my Commodore 64, fuck this noise.
Fire game
If I bought the game, why would I be streaming it anyway?
Streaming to steam deck is not a bad idea, actually. It gets more battery life and you can do AAA games at 60 FPS
I would just do it from the desktop, though
I'm not upgrading anytime soon with current RAM/storage prices, which means I'm stuck on 16GB of RAM for now. But eventually that won't be enough. For somebody who doesn't already have a halfway decent computer and doesn't have a ton of time to game, I can see this being a much better deal than owning your own computer (provided your internet latency and bufferbloat are good enough). For the amount of time I actually use my computer for gaming I know it would be.
I can guarantee you that you haven't played every good game playable on your hardware. If new games aren't playable anymore don't fucking buy them. You will never run out of games to play in your lifetime.
I was one of the people who was actually happy with stadia (although my ping was 5ms with symmetrical gigabit actually hitting the numbers at the time) the controller support was fantastic and it cost $15 a month including some games.
You can thank GeForce NOW switching to an hourly limit model that ended up being successful because people are stupid.
They can fuck right off...
Lol for comparison geforce now is $8.33/month(for yearly plan)for 100 hours a month, plus 15 unused hours roll forward.
I haven't thought about geforce now for a while. It's a bit of a different prospect now it's owned by the highest valued company in America.
Welcome to the future, my friends, where soon enough you will not be able to own your own at-home compute because it's too expensive, and instead you'll just have to pay hourly to use someone else's compute.
Just like the good old days we had to visit an internet cafe to buy a time bundle and send an email
In France they call it le compute
Linux sever at home + sunshine for stream. MS can eat a dick.
How about I never """buy""" a game again from you Microsoft?
Jesus. I'm like all in on indie studios and old games. I don't need this bullshit in my life. It's already too much if a headache to comprehend what's possibly worth it or not when you pay by the month or the hour to try and figure out budgets and so on. Cancel it all, play the old shit and pirate the rest.
Same
Get absolutely fucked.
Piracy Stonks
How about no?
If I saw what emulation and decomp/recomps are doing I would grab at any penny I saw.
🤣
And sunlight/moonlight will only cost you your own electricity to run your computer as you stream.
F that MB BS crap.
What a deal! Especially since the next gen Helix thingy is probably going to cost around US$1800, XBox is definitely the future of gaming. All hail Asha Sharma, the savior of XBox! (/s for those at the back who can't hear me clearly.)
they definitely want to put XBOX to the grave in favor of continuing the AI grift.
What games will be billed at an hourly rate that are worth playing that won’t be on Steam or the high seas? Console exclusives that will be available to emulate at some point?
I think people are reading the headline incorrectly here. This is purely cloud streaming, if you have a PC or console you can use you should just use that.
This is no different to geforce now.
Gamers gotta buy compute tokens, too. Welcome to devops billing, gamers. The tech companies decided they're done just taxing each other, time to tax you, too.
Whatever happened to cloud streaming using your own goddamn console?!
It's funny. Because pretty soon individual "Game Designers" will for the first time be able to create highly complex games using generative AI in very little time. Any game. Even games with a scole like GTA 6 could be generated. And as long as the game describes and edits enough, they will also be an individual creation. Triple AAA video games with a side of slop will become incredibly cheap to make. Much will be total garbage, but we'll see some really cool new ideas that would never have been made before.
This enshittification we're seeing now will only drive this process faster. Even games piracy is going to die lol.
You see a game but don't like some aspect of it? Download someone else's game design document for it and tweak it a bit and generate your own version of that game.
This isn't going to happen because no one person can do all that planning. AI will help but it will require a team of people to plan appropriately. Code is only as malleable as you design it.
At the scale of "write the code to consider everything" the code base becomes impractical, and the context required to manage that many systems is also impractical.
Well true it's not gonna happen "very" soon. You'll basically need source code for games that generalize this stuff, game engine code bases that can encompass various game styles. And presumably a lot of "data worker" work which translate existing games into design doc so it can be used for training.
But most AAA games share very similar gameplay elements just with different art and music and characters and story, one or two new features. Much of the code base is like "player / camera controller" and then a lot of items and weapons and levels and encounters.
So you don't need to manage an entire colossal code base. But if you imagine just a selection of very strict genres, like first person shooter or realtime strategy game, this provides a rather restricted code base where most is art generation and that is definitely possible. Even MMORPGs like WoW.
You might still need or want e.g. a concept artist that designs characters or supervises art styles. But it's going to be possible for hobbyists to do the work of multi million dollar studios. With a little side of slop of course lol. No doubt "handmade" games still are potentially better but due to budget constraints have not often been and in this future scenario just won't be commercially viable. It's going to be patreon funded game designer crews. And bye bye fucking corporate games industry.
corporate game industry isn't going anywhere but I understand your sentiment. I don't like the hypothetical.
The GamePass thing, where you lose the games you had to buy again, once they sunk it?
Like, I don't hate the pricing if it were not IN ADDITION to already paying for Gamepass, where I feel this all goes wrong is the fact you'd now effectively be paying to pause the game for a bathroom break or whatever and that just feels wrong.
Also paying to wait for the game to start.
Would also be a hell of an incentive for games to fill games with useless filler bullshit that takes time, just because.
Prepare for more 20 minute unskippable cutscenes.
So they are trying to do an internet cafe?
they plan to charge you by click, too
Next: you pay for the game, pay for the time, pay per click, and now competitive losses count toward your profile free, but wins don't count unless they're validated with Xbox gems, now available in 10-packs.
What else do you expect them to do with the billions of dollars of high end data centers they built for copilot? Help humanity in any way?
I dont think anyone should pay a dime for this, but i also dont see what is so horrendously wrong about it, IF it was only applied to new purchases. Nothing retroactive.
Streaming takes up compute. Maybe if they charged more for the games, but they should actually charge less. But that wont happen either. Regular price for a streamed game with fee is a terrible thing.
I hate this new trend of corpo speak using compute as a noun. Ew.
How else do you want to word that Microsoft purchased hardware to run the games for you, and that costs them money?
Processing power, server capacity, all the dozens of terms used before AI techbro trash started misusing a verb because they were twigged on ketamine.
Well this is around from 2000
https://www.hpcwire.com/2000/07/28/sun-microsystems-to-acquire-gridware/
Yeah, stupid tech-bro corpo marketing speech. It's fuckin stupid.
Just trying to point out it wasn't AI tech bros like you said. It was in use before them. Tech bros sure.
Well, what do you see around you, who needs this?
I mean, OK, worked with the Web, so - might happen.
But even with the Web - we don't seem to be on Facebook now, do we?
Also p2p poolable resources are not a bad thing, so honestly I'd want more positive thoughts on this, with ideas how to make a functional p2p system of lending computing power, for games too.
Would likely need overhead in the form of some intermediate bytecode, though, due to different GPUs and architectures, and probably different kinds of it for GPUs and CPUs, and some way to pay, but in general such a thing if made could become the second really popular Kademlia application after BitTorrent.
OK, I've become very dreamy after putting together a clumsy Forth in C, that doesn't even do anything useful, but perhaps one day someone with longer hands.
I read it as Xbox wants to pay you 20 to 40 cents an hour to stream their games... And I thought that seems low.
Nah, you buy the game for $70 plus tax and THEN pay 20-40 cents per hour after that :)
Microsoft wants to charge for providing a service? That seems completely fair. Streaming a game isn't free for them.
IDK, maybe they could put games on some kind of physical media so that users could have the game and not need live service? Like some kind of optical disc? They could charge for add-on DLC, like they used to. Software could be downloaded and stored locally…once. y’know, without being streamed?
And gamers could rent servers. Like they used to. And that could be an income stream for a company.
I'm not arguing that Microsoft is some saint or that they've done nothing wrong. This just seems like a dumb reason to get mad at them. If you buy a digital game from Microsoft and have an internet connection solid enough to stream the game, you likely have the bandwidth to download the game.
You can still buy Xbox games on disc (I sometimes buy discount games used that I missed the first time around). And I read recently that signs are pointing to the next Xbox also having a disc drive for games.
I'm with you on private/rented servers for sure. I still remember all the hoopla about support for dedicated/private servers vanishing the first time around.
Oh fack off
Good evening to you as well.
They want to charge you for something that's free on other platforms.
I honestly wasn't aware of other platforms that stream games for free. A quick web search tells me that Sony offers cloud streaming as part of Playstation Plus Premium, Steam lets you stream from your PC to other devices. I couldn't findany other cloud game streaming services that don't require a charge or subscription; would you point me in the right direction please?
On pc you use third party software to stream, i use Apollo which is a fork of sunshine and Moonlight. As for PlayStation on the PS4 you just used the companion app, I can't remember if you needed plus or not but I wouldn't be surprised if you did. PS5 sells a whole peripheral for it but I think you can still use the app. Not sure, PS4 was hostile enough for me to abandon console gaming and return to pc where it's better and cheaper.
That wouldn't be bad value if it actually included the games.