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
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u/Demonchaser27 17h ago

Yeah... this shit is what I've been talking about to friends and some other subs when they say "everything is going to move to cloud". When even Game Pass (the model where you can just download the games so bandwidth cost is much lower) isn't affordable for one of the largest tech companies in the world, how in the fuck is cloud streaming going to be viable for them?

Nevermind that if density increased, wait times would be ridiculous, they'd start doing system sharing between users (one machine runs multiple games) which will absolutely fuck frame pacing and input latency. The whole thing is a complete and total mess... and they can't even afford to offer ONE hour of gaming per day. And even if they could offer just that one hour, that would not be anywhere near worth the money.

Companies couldn't do this shit when hardware was more affordable, but now? No... we're not likely to move to streaming just because hardware prices are outrageous... We're not the only ones who'd have to pay those outrageous prices, so do the companies trying to host cloud services. And then they have to somehow charge you more than what you used to pay for unlimited use hardware... when people couldn't even hardly afford that. None of the numbers add up.

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u/Mammoth_Park7184 16h ago edited 16h ago

It's what I've been on at work about over reliance on ai including copilot. Microsoft are going to suddenly rug pull and wack restrictive limits on token usage until you pay through the nose now theyve got you addicted. 

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u/UnrealRealityX 16h ago

That's always been the end goal, and why I've been living and teaching my family to not rely on these types of services and to have things run locally as much as realistically possible, because the rugs, they are gonna fly once daddy shareholder wants more money from a rock.

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u/IAmTheJudasTree 14h ago

It's interesting being old enough now (I'm 36) to have gone through the lifecyle of a new product/service/technology, so I could experience first hand when it was first launched and got popular and was at its peak in terms of what it offered customers, before being gradually enshittified to squeeze more and more money out of users.

Like I remember the very early days of Youtube there were no ads or very, very few. I remember the early days of Facebook when your Facebook feed was just your friends, not jam packed with sponsored ads, accounts the algo thinks you might like, random AI slop accounts, etc. making it entirely unusable. I remember the early streaming days of Netflix, Hulu, etc. when prices were cheap, nothing had ads, you could share passwords as much as you like - now that's all a thing of the past. I could go on.

Now that I've lived through that pattern, from the first moment I used ChatGPT I said "this, right now, is the friendliest this platform will ever be to me, the consumer. From here on out, it will gradually get more expensive, it will gradually have ads shoved into it, it will gradually get worse in ways I can't even conceive of right now, etc." And lo and behold, last time I logged in to use ChatGPT, there are now ads inserted. It's only going to get worse and worse.

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u/UnrealRealityX 13h ago

You're spot on, and I'm a bit older, but fully went through exactly what you're saying with all those services.

To think, we used to complain about flash ads, and little rectangle banners the size of postage stamps. Now I yearn for those days of simple non-targeted ads! :)

The death of software is also all these SAAS websites where to use anything you have to create an account and use their servers for your personal data. It's why I try to find any locally run and built apps and try to self-host as much as I can. Invoicing, video streaming, CalDav for calendar/contacts, RSS feeds, project tracking, etc. They still exist, and they might not look pretty, but they sure are functional and not taking us for a ride.

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u/Demonchaser27 8h ago

Yeah, they've already been doing it. Several AI services now went from free to heavily limited, and other have heavily reduced tokens. So basically agreed. Shit is completely unsustainable.

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u/15demi08 15h ago

When even Game Pass [...] isn't affordable for one of the largest tech companies in the world

Let's be real here: they don't WANT to make it affordable. Microslop is too occupied putting money into Nutella's gang's pockets and the LLM-craze to actually invest it where it would matter the most.

They have the money to provide good services at affordable prices for the end user. They just don't want to.