r/gaming • u/Force_Hammer • 17h ago

Microsoft to impose time limits on Xbox cloud gaming subscribers as costs continue to climb

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/03/microsoft-xbox-game-pass-cloud-limits.html
11.2k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

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5.1k

u/TermLimp3134 17h ago

"you don't need hardware, you can just stream your games"

how's that working out?

2.1k

u/Googoo123450 16h ago

"everything is an Xbox" lmao

679

u/Castun 16h ago

"Don't you guys have phones?!?"

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u/disavery 11h ago

now that blizz is owned by xbox this hits home and hits hard lol

21

u/vertigostereo 7h ago

Spend $5 to finish your Overwatch 2 match!

Upgrade to play 2 more hours of WoW!

1

u/AssPennies 3h ago

I can't let the raid down tho

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u/Savetheokami 12h ago

“It’s all computa”

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u/rbrgr83 15m ago

Microsoft: "Start all the downloadin'!"

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u/nozappyplease 15h ago

Ex-box

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u/rbrgr83 14h ago edited 12h ago

They're about to be Ex-xbox

10

u/StormerSage 12h ago

Xbox Done

2

u/dexter311 2h ago

Xbox None

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u/Financial-Bid-8062 5h ago

more like x-exboex

0

u/Ok-Lime-7105 10h ago

You should have way more upvotes for this comment

40

u/Zalvren 14h ago

For some time (5/10/15 hours per month)

Then, nothing is an Xbox

4

u/PocketCSNerd 13h ago

"Don't you guys have Xboxes?!?"

1

u/Frequent_Opportunist 11h ago

"Everything is a bucket."

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u/killamcleods 10h ago

EVERYTHINGS COMPUTER!

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u/hpstg 9h ago

“This piece of ass meet, here, is an Xbox”.

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u/North_Tip_3364 3h ago

For 15 hrs a month and another 20 bucks for 5 hrs additional

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u/spmbx 14h ago

“Fortunately we have a product for people who aren't able to get some form of connectivity: it's called Xbox 360.”

  • Don Mattrick

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u/GlassLost 14h ago

You have no idea what morale was like for us when he said that. Like... We were working insane hours to get Hydra going and he just shot us all in the back.

I was a very new engineer at the time, it was my first interaction with stupid management.

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u/diiegojones 13h ago

How was the after shock? Did you witness any internal fallout?

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u/GlassLost 12h ago

I had been an engineer for like a year. And I was insulated from politics. All I can tell you is that the vibe suddenly sucked - it went from hopeful to pointless.

15

u/DaleDimmaDone 12h ago

How do you deal with that? I have a similiar feeling at my job rn but for multiple reasons a job search is not a possibility atm

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u/GlassLost 12h ago

I dunno. I was young - it didn't really phase me. I was working in the video game industry and I didn't appreciate the ramifications of what he'd said. I was more affected by everyone else.

Now that I'm older I have many more options - I left a team last year because I didn't think they were on a good path. My coping mechanism would be to leave.

When I finally burnt out at Xbox, 4 or 5 years after that console launched, I went out pretty hard (your first experience with burnout "sneaks" up on you in my experience).

11

u/SirSoliloquy 8h ago

Not OP, but for similar low-morale situations at other jobs I started to take the following perspective:

My job is to do what they tell me in return for a paycheck. I’ll do my job as well as I can, and I’ll make suggestions if I think of anything, but I no longer personally care whether a venture succeeds or fails.

5

u/ikarikh 7h ago

I just focus on "I meed money. This is my way of making money right now. At least i have a job and money. So many don't. My life could be a lot worse. Just gotta bare with it and save whatever i can for now until i can afford to find something better."

Yes, other people having it worse doesn't mean i'm suddenly "happy" with my job. But it's more about perspective. I could be homeless and starving or worse. I'm thankful to have a job that i can keep a roof over my head and food on my table with even if i'm not very happy at the job.

And tomorrow's another day. So there's always hope, even 12 years later into the job.

7

u/Zer_ 12h ago edited 12h ago

You don't. When working in the arts, each time something like this happens it eats away at your desire to work at all. 16 years ago when I started in the industry, there were people already burning out constantly after only a few years (And that was working as a contractor). Everyone has a different breaking point here and well, the only way to "deal" with that is to offset the pointless work with something that brings you fulfillment. I mean if none of this resonates with you, then perhaps your of the same ilk as all these leaders making compromising decisions that undermine artistic vision.

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u/DaleDimmaDone 12h ago

I deeply understand.. its driving me mad. Thank you for sharing

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u/Zer_ 11h ago

I wish I had better to offer. I guess the only consolation is to try and find hobbies outside work that bring you the fulfillment you need. Free time permitting of course. (Free time being a luxury many don't have).

3

u/RetPala 12h ago

At the time I walked past this statue every day going to work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katy%C5%84_Memorial_(Jersey_City)

3

u/wombatcombat123 12h ago

Hydra?

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u/GlassLost 12h ago

Sorry, that was the OS, the more regular codename was Durango, or Xbox One.

2

u/Kills_Alone PC 12h ago

Ironic timing given that Negan was playing Gears 2 with an Xbox 360 in a recent episode of TWD: Dead City, because yeah it got me thinking how many newer consoles/games wouldn't even work without internet.

1

u/R_W0bz 12h ago

Ahead of his time in hindsight.

1

u/ProfessorBylethBoobs 11h ago

“We recognize there are some people that may not be able to afford [the Switch 2's] price point. That's why we wanted to make the other Switch platforms available, so [people] still have an opportunity to come into our gaming universe, be a part of these characters in these worlds, and see value, if you will, in whatever rung of the platform they come in."

- Doug Bowser

1

u/articwolph 9h ago

Oh shit I almost forgot about that

1

u/doubledeus 9h ago

That should be on his tombstone.

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u/HeartInTheSun9 14h ago

Exactly. There’s so many hidden costs that they’re just not talking about.

It’s the same with ai. It’s free to use chat gpt right now, but no one will ever use it for anything when the real cost of each use is charged. They’re just hiding it hoping to get people hooked and fire their whole staff, but the real costs are higher than a human worker.

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u/Ree_For_Thee 11h ago

The sooner that bubble implodes the better.

I'm sure there are niche cases where it's profitable. I mean, how hard can it be to have it check emails and filter for "Where's my package?" and answer? Stuff like that.

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u/HeartInTheSun9 9h ago

Yup. There’s practical and small uses for it. But not enough to pour trillions into it and call it the biggest thing that’ll ever exist and prop up our entire economy on it.

2

u/the_original_kermit 9h ago

I don’t know about that. There are pretty substantial use cases for it.

And there’s a few use cases out there that, if they worked, might have the potential to automate a lot of aspects of society that are currently not.

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u/HeartInTheSun9 9h ago

I don’t think that’s really true, but say it is true. It’d be easier for you to have a butler do everything around the house for you, but the reason you don’t is because the cost of it won’t let you.

Well, the real cost to automate those jobs costs more than a human worker. So the real cost of ai would stop them from doing those use cases. And ai is basically the cheapest it’s ever gonna be right now because they need to build hundreds and hundreds and hundreds more data centers and they need so much more electricity that they can’t secure. They’ve built so many data centers that just sit there unplugged because they can’t power them and they need hundreds more to hit their milestones that they promised they’d hit. Everyone that puts money into ai companies loses that money. It’s a pure dead end and the only ones who think otherwise aren’t looking into the financials.

Would you use the ai feature on Google if each use was $5? No.

-1

u/the_original_kermit 8h ago

Yes, but costs will go down. And energy issues will get solved.

You got hundreds of companies trying to claw at a space in AI. As they drop out, you will see other companies move in to buy their compute and consolidate energy resources.

You’re looking at AI in the consumer space. Remember that Microsoft basically abandoned making money on Windows in the consumer space and focuses all their effort on profiting from the enterprise space.

If you’re paying a software dev $150k a year, then as much as $1k a month for even a 10% increase starts to look attractive . Not that they are charging that much, but it’s a lot bigger think than $5 a month google subscription for your mom.

3

u/HeartInTheSun9 8h ago

Costs will not go down. You don’t understand what you’re talking about by saying that because costs are shown to only go up. No one can figure out a way to lower the costs even in their wildest estimates.

Nothing you said is true. The closest you’ll get to hearing a step by step refutation to everything you said and an explanation of it is in this video with an ai skeptic:

https://youtu.be/Lf5oqGOCRCM?si=nT3gtexjN8ir-SfA

He explains how the energy costs not only won’t go down but will only go up and there’s no way for anyone to solve that.

And I’m not looking at it from a consumer perspective. It works even worse in a business sense, but consumers just point blank won’t use it if it wasn’t being subsidized. It’s so unnaturally expensive per prompt and it’s the cheapest it’ll ever be right now because they’re subsidizing it. Except the subsidies are finally starting to run out for everyone.

Businesses are already starting to pull out because the costs are too high.

Like I said, everything you said is refuted with all the proof in that video.

1

u/the_original_kermit 8h ago

I’m not watching a 2.5 hour long video. If you want to link a source go ahead.

But you think that per token compute costs will increase over time, that would be some pretty ground breaking news. Because everything on the market is predicting the exact opposite.

The cost of serving one million output tokens on an H100 dropped from $0.85 in Q1 2024 to $0.38 in Q2 2026, a 55% decline driven by continuous batching software improvements, the shift to FP8 inference, and declining spot GPU prices. B200, starting from $0.42 per million tokens in Q1 2025, sits at $0.19 in Q2 2026. B300 at $0.11 per million tokens in Q2 2026 represents a 71% reduction from H100's 2024 baseline.

source

2

u/woutersikkema 5h ago

Sure. Optimizations exists. But won't solve the problem. If it costs you 5 bucks per "token" and you get paid maybe 1. Even if you cut your costs by 28% your still not break even by a long shot. It's why all these AI companies are bleeding money left and right. The only winner is Nvidia. (who is hoping when the bubble pops everyone will forget all about how they shafted consumers)

1

u/HeartInTheSun9 7h ago

Like I said, it’s a great video between an ai skeptic and an ai supporter. He gives the source supporting what I’m saying where all those evaluations are pure fiction that they’re hyping up to make it sound better. I’ll try to rewatch it to find that part, and I’ll update you when I can, but I do recommend you watch it if you want a view counter to what you constantly hear from people who stand to gain from ai actually being the next big thing.

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u/woutersikkema 5h ago

Costs won't go down, costs will go up, A LOT. every single AI prompt you do costs that company money, somewhere between one and 5 euros lol. Every single prompt.its why they are making losses, A LOT of losses.

0

u/Low_discrepancy 2h ago

somewhere between one and 5 euros lol.

Have no idea where you came up with those numbers. And be it so, many orgs are deploying open source models on their own machines.

They can immediately see the costs and benefits. If it was shit they would stop doing it.

The reality is gaming is 5% of Nvidia's revenues. 4 years ago it was 50%.

If people think Nvidia will return to being a gaming company I have a bridge in London to sell them.

If bubble goes pop, and (big if) people will 100% stop LLMs, Nvidia goes bankrupt. Most likely though people will still run LLMs and Nvidia will remain a mainly datacenter GPU company.

1

u/Tyfyter2002 5h ago

I'm sure there are niche cases where it's profitable. I mean, how hard can it be to have it check emails and filter for "Where's my package?" and answer? Stuff like that.

Much, much harder than using a dedicated language model, the entire idea of LLM-based tools is that if you brute force making a sentence believably human-written hard enough, some of that effort might have gone towards making it right, but if instead you use that brute force statistical analysis directly on determining what does and doesn't match some criterion, you need a lot less of it.

2

u/the_che 5h ago

ChatGPT already costs quite a lot if you want to use it in any productive way.

1

u/JuiceAccomplished241 9h ago

Higher than a human worker? Where did you hear that?

2

u/HeartInTheSun9 9h ago

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemmagreen/2026/07/02/ai-costs-more-than-the-people-it-replaced/

There’s links inside that story that get into it more but that’s a good summary of it.

It’s all such a scam. It’s more expensive and does a worse job.

6

u/cansofgrease 13h ago

"And now, yous can't get hardware."

2

u/Shishakliii 13h ago

Don't buy expensive consumer grade hardware, rent our 4x the price and less performant enterprise hardware for more!

2

u/siphillis 13h ago

Like literally everything else at Xbox

2

u/hobo_chili 12h ago

I fucking hate Microsoft

2

u/Goronmon 12h ago

People tried to pretend otherwise but cloud gaming hardware has the same issues all hardware has now, greatly increasing costs.

No point losing money trying to subsidize cloud gaming when you can make easy more money spending those resources supporting AI products and services.

3

u/Nincompoop6969 13h ago

And people think there solution is to go to another console or PC instead when that won't make a difference 

3

u/Steve_3vets 13h ago

4,60$/h ... after 350h of playtime you have a 5080 at current market prices. Holy shit thats a bad Deal

1

u/Pr0digy_ 11h ago

Those rent a dedicated gpu ads for pcs make my blood boil

1

u/hpstg 9h ago

The stupidity and lack of common sense in this phrase, is a benchmark of the average C-suite golden boy and girl.

1

u/Korachof 6h ago

None of this shit is profitable. Cloud gaming isn’t profitable. Game pass isn’t profitable. Ai isn’t profitable. All of this shit is about throwing money at it until it magically becomes profitable, even though it isn’t. 

1

u/OutlyingPlasma 1h ago

It's working out exactly as everyone expected and predicted.

-2

u/Jayrodtremonki 14h ago

To be fair, at the rate we're going the hardware is going to be $5k for the next console.