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/JoushMark 15h ago

Google spent a billion dollars learning there's no way to profitably make a cloud gaming system. Either the performance is bad enough nobody wants to pay for it, or the performance is good but it's so expensive nobody wants to pay for it, or the performance is good and the price is good but every customer you sign up cost you more money then they pay you.

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u/NMe84 14h ago edited 11h ago

The only way game streaming is any good is if you do the streaming yourself. I stream from my PC to my TV using Sunshine and Moonlight and that works great, but I can't imagine for a second that I'd pay for that experience but with worse latency and the risk of games being taken from you at any moment.

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u/Fuzzy-Function-3212 10h ago

Sunshine and Moonlight

Isn't that a Balance Druid spec?

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u/PigDog4 11h ago

Two questions:

1) How annoying was getting sunshine and moonlight set up?

2) Have you tried externally from your network? If so, how was it?

I've done some light hosting and streaming when I'm traveling using previously Parsec and more recently Steam Link and they're both fine (steamlink is better, parsec was a little rough). Not looking to play anything fast twitch when traveling but it is nice to be able to game.

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u/NMe84 11h ago

Installing Sunshine was pretty easy, it's just an installer and then a web interface, as the software itself is mostly just an API. And since I don't have a 16:9 @ 4K monitor (I have an ultrawide and a 1080p one instead) I set up a virtual monitor for Sunshine to use, so that I can stream 4K HDR content to my 4K HDR TV.

Moonlight required a bit more attention, most of which was because of my TV having a terrible ethernet adapter, meaning I didn't have enough bandwidth for 4K content until I switched to wifi (since it does have Wifi 6). Installing the app itself was easy enough though, my LG TV is easy to put into developer mode, and from there you can install Moonlight from the homebrew store.

I haven't tried it outside the house yet, but I'm on Gbit symmetrical fiber so it should be no problem to stream in great quality as long as the receiving internet connection is also decent. I imagine latency will be a bit more of an issue there, though. Though that's obviously less of a problem with particular games. I've been playing Baldur's Gate 3 recently and since that's turn based, the latency doesn't really matter.

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u/evoc2911 5h ago

The only related Xbox streaming that works for me is greenlight to stream from my Xbox to the Steamdeck in the same room..

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u/HulksInvinciblePants 11h ago edited 11h ago

Microsoft’s stated reason is still a problem though. Google was way too early to the scene. The tech today is finally refined enough to be “useable” but all the required expansion to support it has skyrocketed from a rounding error to a real expense.

Since I still believe it’s a compromised experience, even at its best, the faster it disappears the better.

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u/JoushMark 10h ago

Matching the performance of a gaming PC in a VM on a server was never cheap and will never be cheap. The gamble is that most of the people that want this will use it to play Bejeweled and that you'd only have a few people trying to do your big advertised feature like playing Cyberpunk with ray tracing on.

But most people willing to pay for the service want to use the service. They want to play demanding games and that means it's expensive. More expensive then they are willing to pay for the service.

Stadia didn't fail in like, 1996, this shut down 3 years ago. The economics and technology haven't meaningfully moved. Microsoft adding 'pay-per-minute' to their streaming service is a desperate hail Mary to try to find some profitable way, and it's going to fail because nobody wants that.

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u/HulksInvinciblePants 7h ago

The servers were rack mounted custom Xbox hardware if I recall.

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u/JoushMark 5h ago

Kind of? It's a custom AMD chip and an intel processor, kind of like a RX Vega 56 and low end Kaby Lake processor. Xbox one X, if it had been born a little later. Nothing groundbreaking about the hardware, even at the time.

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u/EnkiiMuto 7h ago

I can see services as Xbox pass or investing on tiny indies and a few big hits to be temporarily exclusive as a loss leader.

For the life of me I cannot see how streaming games with your own GPU and Network bill breaks it even, when streaming video is already very difficult to manage (with the exception of Youtube which is a data collection service disguised as a video streaming service).

Same with OpenAI decided to make their slop-tok, the first thought to mind was "...wait, Twitter was spending 1 billion a year trying to cover costs for short text, and you want to generate videos as a way to 'make money first'?"

It is a shame because Xbox did decide to make a competition with the Steam Deck but both are stuck right now because prices are so high... because of AI.

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u/JuanRunJunior 14h ago

Google and offering services is an extremely low bar to viability. They’ve killed things that were working and maybe not the best in its niche without warning. I wouldn’t trust google services past Gmail, they will start something and then abandon it without warning. I would never judge the profitability of something based on their decisions.

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u/JoushMark 14h ago

They spent a billion dollars on Stadia. They killed it because there was no way, even with the economies of scale google can leverage, to make money doing it.

Just because something works doesn't mean it scales or can be done profitably.

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u/CGB_Zach 11h ago

They killed it because it never had the user base. They didn't advertise it so no one knew about it

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u/LIGHTNINGBOLT23 5h ago

For Google, it's always about opportunity cost. Could they have made Stadia profitable? Yes. Was the capital necessary for Stadia better spent elsewhere regarding return on investment? Also yes. That's the reason why Google is known for killing services quickly.

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u/JoushMark 5h ago

There's no indication Stadia had any path to profitability. They attempted for at least 7 years to make it work and in the end deiced killing it was the best thing they could do with their money, after attempting options like just selling the technology and service to other people to run their own streaming game services.

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u/LIGHTNINGBOLT23 4h ago

Stadia as it existed had no path to profitability. Over nearly a whole decade, Google spent about a billion dollars on Stadia if you go by the highest estimates. That is practically nothing for Google, a rounding error at best. If they were serious about its potential, they would have dumped far more investment into it and gotten a path to profitability.

Stadia was a side project for Google and it failed because it got the little attention a side project often gets. Aside from that, Google also demands easy massively profitable wins for their smaller endeavors or else they bail out fast. There's irony in that, since Google's parent company is literally named Alphabet Inc. They're seeking huge alpha, they don't just want a profitable gig.

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u/AdeptCapital148 13h ago

It really does seem like a tricky balance to strike. With so many challenges in the cloud gaming space, it’s no wonder Microsoft is looking for ways to curb costs.

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u/Elum224 2h ago

This sounds made up. Scalable systems work people can have higher system specs because it's shared.

The performance sucks because of light speed. Online game performance will always be shit unless the server is really near your house.

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u/JoushMark 2h ago

Google has amazing economies of scale, but they aren't unlimited. To get low latency high bandwidth streaming game services you have to put a bunch of server racks of high performance equipment near every large population you want to serve. That cost money. Enough money to make your service unattractive compared to just buying your own system and playing locally.

They did the math. The price the market will tolerate does not justify the cost of high performance streaming games. That's why Microsoft is switching to a 'pay-per-minute' scheme to discourage people from using it.