Game Pass Ultimate: 15 hours / month

Game Pass Premium: 10 hours / month

Game Pass Essential: 5 hours / month

And if you’ll allow me to editorialize, there’s a popular enough conspiracy theory that these platforms want to funnel you into cloud gaming for constant subscription revenue. I think the Why We’re Making These Changes section is exactly why these services will never be able to deliver that service at a price people are willing to pay. It’s expensive to provide this service, and they’re making sure they don’t lose any money on it by charging at least what it costs to provide.

  • Katana314@lemmy.world
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    10 hours ago

    Now I’m wondering if this might not have happened if the RAM crisis never happened.

    They have a lot of upkeep on the backend hardware so people can use these services. As server costs go up, it’s likely they’re now strongly motivated to kill the appeal of their own service. In another future where hardware costs were still reasonable, maybe they would’ve let it go.

  • LiveLM@lemmy.zip
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    23 hours ago

    So if you partake in egregiously long gaming sessions of one (1) hour per day, the best plan they have runs out in half a month.

    Lmao.

    • thingsiplay@lemmy.ml
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      1 day ago

      For this:

      Once subscribers use their included hours, they will be able to purchase additional cloud playtime through the XBOX Store

      We understand that for some players the practical result is a higher cost.

    • ampersandrew@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 day ago

      I edited the post to spell that out now. But it really only ever made financial sense for both parties if it was a value add on top of what you already get with Game Pass. We all know how OnLive and Stadia worked out.

      • ampersandrew@lemmy.worldOP
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        20 hours ago

        More like, “Of their Game Pass users, very few use the cloud gaming feature, and even fewer of them would exceed these limits.”

  • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
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    1 day ago

    Wow they’re really efficient at enshittification now. They don’t even need to wait for buyin or for the service to be successful! They just enshittify it early now

    • Prox@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      For real. Cloud gaming was just starting to get somewhat appealing, here they are killing any momentum it may have had.

      • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
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        1 day ago

        I’ve learned that’s just kind of Microsoft’s thing. Whenever they have a product that might actually be a “disruptor” they figure out a way to shoot themselves in the foot.

        • iPod landed but lacked video. Microsoft makes the Zune and it was awesome, but clunky software and a boxy shape made it fall, and they killed it before a needed v2.
        • Xbox & Xbox 360 had Microsoft riding high, and then they ignored gamers and threw away their target market with the Xbox One
        • Hololens promised true AR gaming, and they threw that out before they even made a consumer version.
        • Mixed Reality followed Hololens, was genuinely a cheaper VR alternative, had one myself. Then they silently killed it before reducing the hardware to ewaste a couple of years later.
        • Windows 7 was their best OS after XP, so of course they change everything about it to make Windows 8
        • Skype was the only video calling service that people regularly used, and they bloated it and enshittified it, causing it to collapse just a few years before Covid, allowing Zoom to take over.
        • Cortana had genuinely more functionality than Alexa, but they stopped investing in it, forced it down everyone’s throats, then sunset it, leaving ewaste speakers.

        (and so many more)

        They either come up with a good idea and half ass the execution, leaving the consumer disappointed, or they kill it off before it ever has a chance to take off. Google I guess at least let’s a product get to it’s highest peak making sure they disappoint the maximum amount of users, but Microsoft just makes sure that the users never even arrive.

  • PMmeTrebuchets@lemmy.zip
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    1 day ago

    5 hours a month? Lmao? Are we serious? I will do that in a single evening. This isn’t going to make me go up a tier. It’s just gonna entice me to unsub from fallout first and put the game down.

    • meejle@piefed.world
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      1 day ago

      Especially when the “Ultimate” tier doesn’t even give you long enough to finish most games. 😬

  • Prox@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Xbox snatching defeat from the jaws of victory yet again.
    Sony is fucking up left and right, and gamers are pissed at them. This should be a slam dunk situation for Microsoft, but here we are.

  • warmaster@lemmy.world
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    22 hours ago

    These are great news!

    The service is starving and on life support, soon the biggest cloud streaming service and defender will cease to exist and ownership is one small step closer to being the only option.

  • m-p{3}@lemmy.ca
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    1 day ago

    I just wanna go back to the time where games were offline by default and couldn’t be updated after release…

      • m-p{3}@lemmy.ca
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        7 hours ago

        Why? It made it really important for developers and publishers to release a polished game that worked on day one, because if you fucked up, you’d have to recall the cartridges or discs for replacement.

        And you know what you bought would keep working, wouldn’t require a patch or download if you used it in another game console, decades after, without needing anything but a functional cartridge/disc+console, even if the publisher/developer/console maker doesn’t exist anymore.

        • iamthetot@piefed.ca
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          5 hours ago

          You’ve got some rose coloured nastalgia glasses on, methinks. Games were not always polished to a shine, and they certainly were not bug free. Watch any speedrun of retro games of you think that’s true.

          Updates allow for improvements over time. I think that post release updates for games have been way more of a pro than a con in the grand scheme.

          My much bigger issue is server side connections being required for things.

          • m-p{3}@lemmy.ca
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            1 hour ago

            Yeah it definitely wasn’t all perfect, but at least major bugs were ironed out before launch. I don’t mind the glitch here and there, what bothers me is the quality of games when they release, some are truely pushed out to be sold way too early because the worst thing that can happen is a bit of bad press.

  • HarkMahlberg@kbin.earth
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    1 day ago

    This is “just” for cloud gaming right? Like if you install a game locally through game pass, these limits don’t apply… Right?

  • thingsiplay@lemmy.ml
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    1 day ago

    Divide 300 minutes (that’s 5 hours) by 30 days, to see how many minutes you can play every day: 10 minutes. If we have 15 hours per month, that’s 30 minutes playtime every day.

    I miss the old days where I just popped in the disk, disc or cart in and start playing without internet reliance.