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/Strikereleven 16h ago

They're going back to that 1999 AOL model

253

u/Canadyans 16h ago

Oh god you just gave me dialup flashbacks. Damn you. And you’re right.

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u/HastilyThrownObject 15h ago

“Get off the internet, I need to use the phone!”

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u/justagoddamnperson 13h ago

But my hour isn’t up yet, my brother got the full hour and I had to wait!!!

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u/HastilyThrownObject 13h ago

Holy shit the memories you unlocked. My older brother always stole my hour on the computer and used it to try and look up porn. It was pretty much only images you could look at and they took like 20 mins to load each picture. Then I’d get in trouble for all his porn lookups. Really hard to explain to my parents that it obviously was him because I knew how to clear history and I looked at different porn than him

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u/justagoddamnperson 12h ago

LMAO. Oh god. See my siblings and I were younger and not looking at porn in the dial-up days. I can imagine something like this happening if we were older though 😭

I did get accused of messing up a laptop with porn once but it literally was some chain/spam Myspace message where I clicked the link which gave it viruses, some of which showed porn. My dad was sure I had to be looking at porn in the first place to get that but I wasn’t 😭

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u/HastilyThrownObject 12h ago

Yeah I was like 14 and my brother was 15 in 98 when we got our Gateway PC and a ton of AOL discs

My usage was 25% porn and 75% downloading and printing DBZ pictures with some Gamepro chat room time thrown in occasionally. I had a buddy that stole some XXX VHS tapes from his dad and gave them to me so I tried to stick to analog self satisfaction as much as I could.

My dad was more mad about me using all the ink printing out pics of Dragonball then he was about the porn.

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u/justagoddamnperson 12h ago

Lol, this makes me feel so innocent in comparison. All I was doing was talking to people from school. I still remember how mind-blowing it was when we finally got broadband and you could just have internet all the time and not have to fight over it or take down the phone line. Shit was crazy

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u/HastilyThrownObject 11h ago

Oh I loved that time frame when we finally got high speed. I was a sophmore and only me and my buddy down the street were the only people with broadband in the neighborhood for like 6 months so download speeds were so fast. My dad also got a new computer with a CD writer on it. I learned my neighbor hood buddy with broadband also had a CDR as well so me and him went around our school taking playlist requests and would then go home and download songs off Napster and then rip playlists and sell them the next day, sharing the profits. Sold CDs for $8 a piece for a mix or $11 for an artists album(it was tougher to get an entire album of Napster than just popular songs)

We seriously made like $700 in a few weeks. About halfway through that school year, 4 other kids got high speed and CD burners too and most people stopped buying CDs from any of us

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u/BloodPharts88 9h ago

And then there was me...who was looking up dbz porn as a youngin' in the late 90s lmao

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u/addamee 15h ago

Same. I played an air combat sim back in the day and it was free (provided you had an AOL subscription). The day they began charging for the game as well felt like a slow knife in my young heart

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u/rbrgr83 14h ago

Can I offer you a free coaster in these trying times? 💿

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u/Frequent_Opportunist 11h ago

I miss getting the diskettes in the mail.

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u/GrassyDaytime 10h ago

Yeah, also takes me back to the earliest forms of non-contract pre-paid cell phones. shudders

They were like... 1$ a minute or something? Lmfao

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u/AngriestInchworm 23m ago

The SpongeBob millennials made that into music.

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u/almostoy PC 16h ago

I had an actual local ISP at that time. I walked into their office and handed them cash. Then, we'd tie an onion to our belts and yell at clouds. T'ain't got no right, bein' cloudy as they are, clouds....

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u/justagoddamnperson 13h ago

As was the style at the time

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u/almostoy PC 8h ago

Yes. I actually did pay my ISP in cash. They were that local. Dial up.

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u/1337b337 16h ago

Just swing by WalMart and grab another free 100 Hours Of America Online disc they keep by the checkouts.

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u/Gregus1032 13h ago

I remember going to Burger King, grabbing the whole box they had on display and then my friends and I playing tag with them by throwing them at each other.

It was dumb.

Fun but dumb.

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u/REDuxPANDAgain 12h ago

We microwaved them. My friends parents were pissed lol

1

u/Kills_Alone PC 11h ago

We did that as well, boxes and boxes, thousands of them from Blockbuster, except ours were covered in LSD, basically the same thing though.

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u/Shadowrak 4h ago

I knew kids who would huck them at trains from an overpass

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u/JonZ82 11h ago

But you COULD play neverwinter.. which was awesome at the time.

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u/Driftysilver 16h ago

Oh boy, I remember that. We got the disc that you had to insert to get online. You would pay for your internet service the way we used to pay for phone minutes/texting. Like you bought time and then used it, just like this!!! Holy fuck man, dont give xfinity any ideas...

1

u/XxsteakiixX 13h ago

Remeber when the internet was going to be like cable where only certain websites were accessed if u payed more EWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW

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u/Heiferoni 14h ago

Holy shit this is exactly how early cell phone plans were.

"Only pay for the minutes you use!"

Please let's fucking nip this in the bud right now.

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u/Actual__Wizard 14h ago

Yeah I was going to say: We've regressed all the way back to AOL days. People are going to have to pay hourly to play video games online?

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u/EditEd2x 16h ago

If we’re lucky they go back to 99 phone plans that offered free nights and weekends at this point.

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u/Tipist 16h ago

They better mail me some free coasters CDs then like AOL did!

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u/_Ocean_Machine_ 14h ago

They also flew pretty well if you threw them like a frisbee

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u/MooseMan7 15h ago

Well at least that means they’ll be keeping disc drives

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u/nox66 15h ago

You have more faith than I

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u/omgitsjagen 15h ago

Gemstone III (then Gemstone IV) cost me A LOT of yard mowings back in the day.

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u/dj92wa 14h ago

They’re putting codes in cereal boxes?! We probably had a thousand years of internet saved up from all of those cereal boxes CDs lol

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u/24_August_1814 13h ago

Heh now that you mention it, I think our plan was limited to 15 hours a month of real Internet outside AOL's walled garden.

Of course, mom and dad hated having the phone line tied up so much that we never came anywhere near that...

1

u/Illumynarty_234 13h ago

So then you're saying this will eventually cycle back around to a better alternative that's more cost friendly, right?

... Right?

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u/DJIcEIcE 12h ago

NetZero with 500 hours top up per month. Free dial up forever!

1

u/JACC_Opi 12h ago

Don't remind me!😩

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u/tomkatt 11h ago

No, they’re limiting access, not giving away 5 months free to prevent cancellation.

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u/Aggravating-Face2073 7h ago

MUDs! Multi-undergrad Destroyer!

Young college kids paying $30 to send a digital arrow from Kentucky to Utah & the attack missed! Darn! Oh and servers are only open during daylight hours!

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u/ThanatosIdle 2h ago

No, with AOL I got 1000 free hours. That is 16 years of time from Microsoft's basic plan

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u/synthdrunk 1h ago

By then AOL was unlimited, roll back a few.
In the halcyon days of ma bell style billing dial-in services had—
Monthly fee
Per-minute connect charge. Peak and off-peak rates. Individual doors(/features/games) could have additional charges! Istr both popular multiplayer games and (early on) the chat both having additional charges involved.
People think they’re getting fucked and, while they are, Money remembers going a LOT deeper and has well-positioned itself to go back to thrustin.’