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/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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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)

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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/Fluid-Sink-2514 5h ago

Two and a half hours! I don’t even have time for an ai summary of that.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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u/the_che 5h ago

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

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u/JuiceAccomplished241 9h ago

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

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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.