Microsoft Announces Per-Hour Cost for Xbox Cloud Gaming Service (gizmodo.com) 55
Microsoft has revealed pay-as-you-go pricing for Xbox Cloud Gaming, with introductory packages costing $3.99 for 10 hours, $7.99 for 25 hours, or $11.99 for 50 hours. Starting in November, Game Pass subscribers will receive only 5 to 15 included cloud-gaming hours depending on their tier and will have to buy additional time -- even to stream games they've already purchased. Gizmodo reports: Back in September, before these changes were announced, you paid full purchase price for a game that isn't in the Game Pass library on the assumption that you'd be able to play it via cloud streaming. Maybe your hardware doesn't meet the specs for this fancy new game. Maybe your gaming PC exploded/got stuck on a ship/had a component fail. Maybe you just want to be able to play it in bed on your laptop. Whatever. Now you find that in addition to the cost of the game you bought, you're going to be paying by the hour to play it once your monthly allotment of hours is up. If this is you, I expect you're not particularly amused. Thankfully, Microsoft notes that the playtime you purchase "remains available until it's used," so you won't have to worry about losing any unused time between gaming sessions.
Imma go ahead and announce that nobody cares (Score:3, Insightful)
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Who the fuck is this for?
For the same people who might consider NVIDIA GeForce NOW?
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When GeForce Now first came out it was free if you had a shield/shield tv, it supported your entire steam library, and it worked excellent. Then they decided to voluntarily make the games opt-in for the publishers, who of course all declined because they would rather sell the game to you twice, and they started charging a bunch for the service. I realize it couldn't be free forever, but deciding to charge at the same time that you take away 90% of people's games was never going to be a winning strategy.
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Thanks to our AI Oligarchs, pretty soon no-one will be able to afford a gaming PC so they'll have to rent Microsoft server time to run the games for them.
Re:Imma go ahead and announce that nobody cares (Score:4, Insightful)
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I recently started tt-rpg again with the new D&D. Getting back to pen and paper is really refreshing and fun. Check your local game shop, or college for active gaming groups. Oddly all the players are older folks with a even breakdown in men/women. All the younger folks play MtG or some other card based game. I think Pathfinder might be the rpg for that genre.
Re:Imma go ahead and announce that nobody cares (Score:5, Insightful)
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And, this is exactly why I over-built my tower... 24-core Threadripper, 128gigs DDR4, nine harddrives (2 SSD), Titan X (just the motherboard and CPU was like $1K, which makes that the largest purchase I've ever done).
And, yes... the AI bullsh*t is going to push the price of a decent gaming PC through the roof... CPUs, RAM, video cards, SSDs.
Re: Imma go ahead and announce that nobody cares (Score:3)
Every time I've tried to play a game on a streaming service it became a blurry mess as soon as I started moving. This is on a 500Mb fiber connection.
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Cyber Cafe's, especially in Asia (Score:2)
Who the fuck is this for? Does someone actually want to rent an Xbox over VNC (I know it's not VNC but you know what I mean)?
Yes, cyber cafe's. Especially in Asia. Various US and EU game publishers have had to create hourly based payments schemes for some large Asian markets. Cyber cafe's didn't want to buy per-seat licenses for the games.
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There was a brief cyber-cafe game place here but it crashed and burned very quickly. It that still a thing in Asia or Europe ? There is an old time arcade with pinball and stuff that seems to keep chugging along though.
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And, I bet everyone who would pay this has 200Mbps internet (or faster).
And... I bet there's not another high-usage customer on that particular fiber strand.
Miss those days where we bought a game at a store and got a disc that we could do whatever the hell we wanted with (same for cartridges)... how long is it gonna be until they hit the 'Big Red Delete' button on your $90 copy of CoD51 or your GTA6?
If it's 'Cloud-based' gameplay (assume the full game never downloads to your local machine, you only send con
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Who the fuck is this for? Does someone actually want to rent an Xbox over VNC (I know it's not VNC but you know what I mean)?
The only possible reason I've considered this that there is no way to play the latest NHL and NCAA games on PC, and there hasn't been since 2009. I already have XBox PC Game Pass, and if I upgraded to Game Pass Ultimate for a few months, I could play those games until I get bored of them, and then unsubscribe. I hadn't bought a console since the 360 until the Switch 2, and I don't feel the need to own an Xbox or PS, but would really like to play NHL 2026 and NCAA 2026.
Ha (Score:1)
Knew this was coming.
Does that hourly cost include the hours spent downloading the game from an overcrowded server over your limited amount of Mbps internet?
I would've stuck with the disc-drive having models of both systems, and of course my PCs have optical disc drives.
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Do you have a 10gigabit internet connection where you can stream 4K Blu-Rays in real-time?
So, they've been able to serve enough data in real-time for years that someone on a 100Mbps connection can stream a game in 4K in real-time?
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People watch Netflix and YouTube in 4k on standard broadband all the time. Why is it so surprising that Microsoft can do that? And yeah Nvidia's been doing this for Geforce Now for even longer.
Just like most topics you should do a little more research before you are so grumpy about things. Sounding really ignorant here again.
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Oh, and... forgot to add: why would they count your download time as hours played? Because it's M$.
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I suggest you look up what "cloud gaming" is.
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Cloud saves are one thing... cloud gaming sounds like you don't even download the game locally, and everything is actually run in the cloud (you send commands to the cloud and it moves your character around and the cloud handles all the processing). Bet that takes a ton of bandwidth.
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1080p video is 5-8 Mbps, 1440p is 12-20 Mbps, and 4k is 15-25 Mbps. Hardly outside the range of standard broadband.
And the latency on the services is surprisingly good as well.
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Ran the numbers... 100megabits per second (my connection... Verizon Forward) works out to 12.2 Megabytes per second.
Unless you are the only customer on that link, you ain't getting that steadily... most likely there's thousands connected to the same cell tower I am currently... which doesn't have infinite bandwidth (you can only shove so much data down twisted pair or optical fiber).
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So it takes 5-8 Mbps and you have a connection that 100 Mbps... Why would you divide by 8 to get bytes to compare to bits?
This isn't rocket science, if you can stream video from YouTube or Netflix without buffering, you can stream video at that bandwidth. If your connection is too low to stream video, then of course a game streaming service is going to be problematic for you... Just wow mate.
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And, you're assuming I (let's say, a typical user) have that connection... do I always 100% of the time have that exact connection? Betcha when I add a thousand users to my single access point, it ain't gonna stay the same as far as connection speed and latency (remember, mine is cellular).
And, I bet there aren't a lotta people out there who have fiber run direct to their machine.
Sure, you can have a limited gameplay experience by playing entirely on the cloud, just like you could have a limited Blu-Ray wa
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It might surprise the hell out of you, but not everyone lives in a place with a population density of a thousand endpoints on a single node. Or even has a shared medium with all of their neighbors at all.
It might also come as a galloping shock that this solution may not be acceptable to 100% of the market. If you are outside of the target market... well, what is, is.
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Never hear of a galloping shock... I assume that's like charging a Smart Watch.
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What sort of dumbass argument is this. Yeah, if shoot yourself in the foot it'll hurt. You got me!
If your connection sucks, doesn't mean the offering is bad.
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Not quite. Streaming video typically begins with fetch of a manifest which offers several renditions of a given title at different encodings (resolution, bandwidth, baseline/HDR/Dolby Vision). The player selects an encoding that is compatible with available decoding features, resolution, and estimated link rate. It then pre-fetches segments into a buffer to cope with short term variations in content bulk versus transmission rate. It also can move up or down the list of available encoding rates according to
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Laughing because you don't understand. (Score:2)
If you are playing on the cloud, you aren't downloading the game. But streaming the video of you playing that game.
This doesn't effect local playing of the game, so the disk vs digital doesn't really make sense here. You can stream to a device that has a disk drive just as well as one without. Or stream it to a low spec'd laptop. Or you could download the game/pop in the disk, run it locally and not use this service at all.
This change is that to run the game on their system and stream the video, you only ge
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It doesn't matter if I or rsilvergun or anyone else game a little or a lot.
I buy a game... (say, GTA6)... I (and every single other person) can only play it _only_ if we have a certain internet or something.
Your online service can delete that game from my collection of owned games that I paid a hundred dollars for.
Oh... and hate to break it to you...... the game deletion happens after like 4 months.
How much do you love your 'cloud provider'?
Great business model! (Score:5, Funny)
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And Google Stadia famously didn't have a time limitation. Where GeForce Now which has stuck around for years made that switch years ago.
We had these same comparisons to Stadia [slashdot.org] on Slashdot at that time when Geforce Now switched models. And I opined back then about the economics of it and I still don't think it's changed [slashdot.org].
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I mean, Google Stadia generated billions in revenue, right? Right?
False equivalence. Google has a history of poorly running things into the ground. On the flip side looking at cloud gaming the segment has supported service for over a decade now. Stadia may have shut down but that was a service that came 4 years after Nvidia GeForce Now, a cloud gaming division that has generated enough revenue to remain running and operational for 11 years now (initial beta launched in 2015).
Gaming systems lose their disc drives (Score:5, Insightful)
But gain a credit card swiper.
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The cloud is someone else's computer. You're at the local arcade, throwing quarters in for the privilege of playing.
Game Over. Please Deposit 40 Quarters (Score:4, Funny)
Game Over. Please Deposit 40 Quarters
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4 years is about the lifespan of a generation of console, and 4 hours a day is a lot.
But why is it so surprising that if you are playing all the time and want the best experience that renting will be more expensive than owning. Next thing you'll tell me that you are surprised that taking the taxi for 2 hour commute each day is more expensive than owning a car.
Re: That's awful (Score:2)
Exactly, but math is hard.
Also this is a bargain compared to online game prices in the early 90â(TM)s (Neverwinter Online was $6 an hour if I remember (not that I ever played it because of that)
The Enshittificator (Score:2)
Sounds like they're using his playbook. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
One more time (Score:2)
The cloud is a trap
Run away!
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Just need to put it in older terms: "When renting the landlord doesn't have your best interests in mind. Use caution because owning is often a better deal than renting."
They have a name for this (Score:2)
They already have a good brand name they could have used for this!
It's Xbox, but it's --LIVE--, and it's pay-per-play like an Arcade. "Xbox Live Arcade"!
But the irony of course is that XBLA games you buy and own* and can play whenever you want...
*yes yes, we know.
A Service Nobody Wants Now Charges? (Score:1)
Price before product (Score:2)
that's one way to lose users (Score:2)
wonder if this will push game developers to have pure gameplay and no lobbies, in-game movie clips, etc...
But also, who approved this? This makes it that much closer to being irrelelvent. Not like there aren't other platforms and developers making games one can play without all this BS.