Why do they keep stressing the "games you already bought!!!" part? There is no charge to play the game on your own hardware. This pricing is for renting the GPUs, same as GeForce Now and plenty of other services. And it's a pretty solid deal for people who don't want to build a multi-thousand dollar rig for gaming 10-20 hours a week.
GeforceNow is actually a weird service - you don't only rent the GPU. Nvidia needs to have a licensing deal with the game publisher you want to play (the game you already own). They removed quite a lot of games, because big names like ActivisionBlizzard, 2K and Bethesda withdrew licensing agreements. If I only rent hardware, I don't think I need permission by the IP holder whose software I intend to run there.
It sounds exactly how netcafes operate where the public can lease a computer and play games for a few hours. I don't think it's weird they have to get special licenses just like netcafes do.
Because the model is diverged from the existing model Microsoft established via Game Pass, which made game streaming part of the licensing, not an add-on to purchasing.
Feels bad to buy an expensive piece of hardware, a $60+ game, and then be asked to pony up another hourly fee to play it on your tablet.
Of course, free game streaming was never a viable business model, so this isn't unexpected, but people aren't going to love the change either way.
If you buy the expensive piece of hardware and the game, you can play it on your tablet for free. With Remote Play! You've always been able to do that. Nothing changes.
This is about not buying the expensive piece of hardware. Then obviously it makes sense to charge you for the expensive hardware you're now using in the cloud. Or if you bought the expensive piece of hardware, but for some reason are choosing to use an Xbox in the cloud instead.
Game streaming from the cloud has never been part of the licensing of purchasing a game. It's always been part of a monthly Game Pass subscription. And with games in Game Pass, you don't even have to buy the game in the first place.
I get that some people may not love the change, but it's just more accurately reflecting costs, and there's absolutely no bait-and-switch here. Nothing has changed about what comes with a game you purchased. Nothing at all.
>but people aren't going to love the change either way.
Perfect quote to summarize the direction of modern gaming. People are in stockholm syndrome over it though and aren't going to leave. Remember when Oblivion horse armor was over the line? Literally everything has gotten worse from that point despite no one being happy about it.
That is not quite accurate -- the Game Pass library was a subset of what could be streamed -- things that were not available in Game Pass could still be streamed provided you owned them. When games went out of Game Pass you could purchase them and continue streaming.
Seriously! They're not charging you for the "streaming" or for the "game you already bought" -- they're charging you for renting the Xbox in the cloud that is running the game, the GPU.
I get that it was free before as part of a subscription, but now GPU's are more expensive. Nothing that you paid for up-front is being taken away. The subscription plans just changed is all.
10-20 hours a week is a lot of gaming. Was it suggested that was a small amount and not worth the investment to have an actual machine? 10-20hrs over a month is more in the realm of streaming imo.
Xbox Cloud Gaming gives you 50 hours for $12. You could game for 3333 hours to equal the Xbox Series X in price ($800). Say you want to depreciate the device over 7 years, that's about 500 hours of gaming a year, or ~9-10 hours a week.
I'd say that's a pretty reasonable limit for a low volume, casual gamer.
In the case of Xbox, you'd get something comparable to Xbox Series X (or S in some situations). So it's hardly comparable to a multi-thousand dollar rig.
Rentals are not solid deals. They are designed to hamper ownership and force you to rent forever. At least be honest and say you think monopolies should be able to make hardware artificially unaffordable so people are forced to pay subscription fees instead.
Not going to be viable for entire genres of games because latency.
AIs can't open source games, they can only assist in pirating them.
But pirates have historically done a pretty good job without AI.
Existing trends towards games with required online components, subscription-based content and microtransactions will no doubt continue, of course.
Not streaming, other than as an extra-cost option, because the margins on subscriptions and microtransactions are bound to be orders of magnitude higher while providing more value to the majority of players.
"""Open sourcing""" (this needs maximum scare quotes) games by AI-washing the decompilation is legally just about the same as cracking. You won't be able to deploy the result on a walled garden console and most likely not for for money anywhere, and FOSS people won't touch it with a ten-foot pole.
And then one generation from now there are no more hardware consoles and you are stuck streaming games from the cloud from your thin-client smart TV. Yet another joy of actually having a physical thing taken away from us, yet again.
While visiting not(USA) recently, found Xbox Cloud streaming no longer viable (lag fest) though last year travels (even over 5g hotspot) it was fine. Doesn't bode well for this streaming concept.
Looked for a real console and discovered all small shops and big box chains offer Nintendo and PS, none have Xbox. Speaking with managers revealed they or their suppliers "lost" or "ended" contracts to carry it.
Secondary market / used was dirt cheap – good condition consoles for less than a new controller: €35 for Xbox One S, €85 for Xbox Series S.
The Xbox console is a pretty bad deal outside of the US because a lot of the software features (streaming apps etc.) don't work outside the US. Everyone buys PlayStation instead. Nintendo is of course doing their own separate thing focused on exclusive games.
Sounds fair. If you essentially already have a TV or other device as a thin client, I can see many people happily paying $12 for 50 hours compared to spending $1000 on the entire console
Yeah like the Google Stadia. I think there was news of someone who spent >100s of hours on Red Dead Redemption 2 only to have all his save data wiped when Stadia shut down.
It will be $1/hour in a year. Then you will have to pay a different rate for better graphics. These things don't end well. Once they see that they have a stable customer base, they will figure out how to squeeze even more money from their customers. Of course, it will be advertised as something that the customers themselves required and they do it for them, not for themselves.
The unfortunate reality is that all of the fun recompilation projects are helping seal the fate of us not being able to run games, or software in general, on our own hardware. The risk is very quickly becoming too great for proprietary software publishers in letting compiled artifacts land in customers' hands.
I feel GTA 6 will be the last mainline GTA that we run on our local systems.
That’s actually a really interesting take I hadn’t thought of. I’m involved in a decomp project (that to my knowledge is all human created) and knew there would be a legal reconning for AI powered projects, but I didn’t anticipate the business model changing to prevent near future releases from being preserved through fair use RE. What a bleak outlook.
This is not necessarily the case, as you still need to deliver an experience that customers enjoy and will pay money for. This means consoles that let them play games in their hands with the highest picture quality and lowest latency. No disruptions from poor wireless or significant interference in environments like apartment complexes.
Fully homomorphic encrypted processing may also become a norm and if that is combined with some games going back to being console only, there could be significant enough protection for games that contain trade secrets. That said, the days may be numbered for trade secrets at all given that better models may make today's clever trade secrets look juvenile.
At the same time, a lot of these games were already getting decompiled and inspected at runtime. That has historically been one part of the incentive to release games on console only or console first, particularly first party titles.
In any market where it's relevant to their business interests, they can still rely on the copyright laws and can set traps for any companies using decompiled code as part of their own paid and sold product. That whole process will become cheaper and easier to do as well, plus new approaches to slowing down or hindering the results of decompilation will become normal for games in mathematically provable ways. We've already seen approaches over the years like Denuvo.
Always online games themselves have benefited from some of their code being in the cloud and that will obviously be under fire more than ever with people writing their own servers, but even that might have novel approaches that can survive advanced tampering.
I have a server running in my basement with 2 nvidia Tesla GPUs that I bought for ~$70 each on ebay. (Unfortunately the RAM cost an arm and a leg). I built it for inference, but I also set it up to run sunshine server and now I have my Steam library on the TV through a Raspberry Pi 3. Even better, it was a fun and interesting project, maybe not as straightforward as you think. Unfortunately it's entirely possible that it costs .24/hr just for the electricity.
Now, this feels fine with <10ms input latency over wifi. Even in 2026 I'm skeptical about sending my input to Atlanta and back.
Except we literally just had stories about ... LG, was it? ... spying on everything - and the obvious way for that to happen is to plug your TV into the internet.
Xcloud is about a RTX 3060 Ti which you can rent, including power and the rest of the system from $0.03 per hour as a spot price. At scale Microsoft should be able to be able to get a better price than just the hardware component.
Seems reasonable for your average user who games 10-12 hours a week and would not want to go through the hassle of owning and maintain a physical console (plus paying electricity on that).
When did owning a physical console become a hassle and require maintenance? I feel like I'm on crazy pills reading the comments in this thread. They can't be real.
It takes up space, you've got to clean out the dust from the fan grill every so often, it requires constant maintenance in software updates every time you turn it on, unless you leave it on all the time in which case it's using non-trivial power all the time. I have an Xbox. But there's no question that it would be a much simpler setup to not have one.
> Seems reasonable for your average user who games 10-12 hours a week...
"XBOX Game Pass Ultimate" gives you fifteen hours per month of "cloud playtime" for 23 USD per month. "XBOX Game Pass Essential" gives you five hours per month for 10 USD per month. [0][1] You are currently unable to buy more hours (or play for "free" by watching adverts!) unless you are an "XBOX Insider"... [2][5] but, let's assume that what's in the AT article is what "XBOX Insiders" are paying.
So, uh, this seems like -as the kids say- dogwater for "your average gamer who games 10-12 hours a week". Unless I've fucked up my math, for your forty hours of play time, you're paying between 22 USD (with an "Essential) subscription and 31 USD (with an "Ultimate" subscription) per month.
You're paying 260->370 USD per year for the ability to stream the games. If you buy your consoles used, [3] you're paying enough to buy one or two mid-end XBOXes or ~three low-end XBOXes every year. [3] If we go back to new prices in that distant year of 2025, [4] you're still buying an entire XBOX every year just for the privilege of being able to play video games for a handful of hours on Saturdays and Sundays.
[5] Given that that "free" tier exists, no points shall be awarded to those who are able to predict what XBOX "cloud playtime" pricing trends are gonna look like over the next year or so... it's like dynamiting fish in a barrel.
Different from others, I don't think the price is fair. But also I don't know the cost structure well enough, I can have only an educated guess.
But what I am definitely afraid of is that they will want to charge games per hour anyway.
The talks that consoles will cost 2000 USD is part of it. They don't want you to own things anymore.
You can't buy a house anymore, because they rather buy and keep it to create shortages and make you pay an absurd rent.
We should be talking more about how taxes should fit into this world where they are positioning themselves to not allow people to have things, not even the basic.
For examples, in the housing thing, it should not only have higher taxes for keeping properties empty but also it should be exponential otherwise it will become a cost to people. Making it exponential make it unviable.
Also, investment funds should be much more regulated and should require approval for every transaction above a threshold (which imo should be small to close loopholes).
This will slow things down enough.
The demand will still exist but companies will fill the gap. We should not be relying on one single investment fund to control your health, housing and employment.
We also should be discussing on closing all the gaps that ultra rich are using to not contribute back to the system they explore.
They became leeches/parasites and not putting back the amount they should is causing them to be able to break the system more and more.
The only Pacific way right now is to boy;cott these big fellas.
They got to comfortable saying that we are trash and the blame of everything is on us while doing everything they can to not even pay basic rights to employees.
I also think that if you know a trillionaire employee with a white collar, they also should get bit more pressure.
I know someone working in a company which recently caused hundreds of "collateral" deaths, and for him and everyone in the company, it is not their fault they exploded innocent people. We need to put these folks back to reality, because they are the same type of trash as we are, and they don't know it.
Now I guess it is obvious why they have been building so many bunkers lately.
They were definitely conspiring.
(Btw, I have a strong feeling that sxai+t might become an investment fund with several companies, but that's another conversation)
Who do you think is paying to keep coming that way? Businesses that have an interest in keeping it that way, for example comercial realestate companies.
That just seems like such a strange offering. The number of supported devices is fairly low[0], and you already need to have purchased the game (well hold a license to the game). Some of the supported devices are Xboxes and some are Smart TVs, in that setup it would make more sense to have the TV use your own Xbox (assuming that they are on the same LAN).
The price seems a little high, as I expect them to be before tax and currency conversion, but mostly I struggle to see who this is for.
How is this number "fairly low"? It supports every Windows and Mac PC, iOS, Android, Xbox, Quest VR and most major TVs and TV sticks. What exactly are you gaming on?
Okay, that might have been worded wrong. I don't the device selection as being particularly supportive of more than a few limited use cases. If you're at home it would make more sense to support your Xbox streaming to your VR headset or Smart TV, you shouldn't have to go via the cloud.
If you're out, on vacation or something, then sure streaming to your phone or tablet makes sense, but you're not going to sign in to a random Smart TV or PC with your Xbox account (at least Microsoft shouldn't encourage that behaviour). That just seems like such a limited use case to me.
No, there'll just be fewer big-budget games. Streaming is always going to be a sub-par experience (latency and video compression). And the mess that AI made of the hardware market has likely killed off (or at least indefinitely postponed) the next generation of games consoles
But we've got 4-5 decades of games to enjoy.
Part of the reason that the games industry is struggling is that there's been no real generational leaps for a long time. Gaming used to be driven by those technological leaps, but these days we just get incremental improvements. 10-15yr old games are just as entertaining as brand new releases and often don't look too dated.
Also, ever more people are getting into retro gaming, enjoying the classics from the 80s and 90s, from well before microtransactions and hyper-competitive online multiplayer.
Nevermind the generational leaps, there has been a lack of creativity and a flood of low quality titles that make it harder and harder to find the few good games among them.
I've had better luck finding great games I didn't know about from the 1990s than from the past twenty years.
Is this a logical conclusion or is this correlation in a time when companies in myriad industries are pushing rent over buying because margins are so much better?
Piracy has been present since the advent of the personal computer and I think it's accepted by most that some people will pay, and others just won't. I'm not sure that AI reverse engineering changes this picture.
>Is this a logical conclusion or is this correlation in a time when companies in myriad industries are pushing rent over buying because margins are so much better?
I think both, I would argue that right now, giving hardware into the hands of your customer presents a much bigger risk nowadays. Streaming is obviously the better option for margins, and now it is basically the only option to keep the product under control. Also now that consumer GPU/memory is getting more and more expensive, I think it has become realistically the only way forward.
This, and the next generation of consoles being no less than 1600$/€ on day one.
Given they're moving to digital-only future I fully expect them to sell a "50$ + monthly subscription" dongle-like version of ps6 and xbox where you can play the game you buy as a streaming solution, or pay the aforementioned price for a "locally hosted" device on a console.
I can't see the next generation ever launching unless the market recovers.
And I'm not sure we're ever going to see cheap RAM or GPUs again. There's clearly more money to be made at current price levels, and not much potential for competition to fix the market.
They can certainly try but I'm not convinced that gamers are gonna latch onto the idea. Sure, a new GTA game might be able to do it to a certain level of success, but I'm not sure a Gears of War: E-Day will be able to get people to pay a constant subscription to stream it. Indie games will almost certainly not go streaming exclusive, so you'll now be competing even more fiercely with indies and older games.
Your "logical conclusion" ignores that many popular games rely on online content anyway. You still need their servers without needing it to be streamed.
Why did you have to phrase it like this, instead of just bringing up your own counterpoint?
Also, I'd see the concern here as where the code runs: if there is a dependency on the server to pull down code/assets, but it still runs it locally, then there is still an opportunity to pirate it locally - So this isn't a point about cloud-dependence, but AI/piracy specifically pushing execution to the server side.
Can you walk us though your thought process here? Is piracy actually a problem? How is taking away ability to play offline a "logical conclusion"? Based on what evidence?
I bought one game and received a Chromecast Ultra and Stadia controller at no extra cost, then had the entire purchase refunded automatically years later. Great deal!
Will Reverse Engineer Anything also reverse engineer an xbox and materialize it out thin air? Because if not I don't see how that help.
MS is charging you 24 to 40 cent to rent a GPU so you can play without having to buy hardware, they aren't charging you to play your game on your own hardware.
I don't think this is inherently unreasonable, keeping in mind that gaming cafes are (perhaps quickly becoming a were) a thing, and in those you were usually provided some set of games that the center owned or licensed, but also allowed to log in via something like Steam and play your own games. Xbox / Consoles in general were already a walled garden compared to, say, GOG, and heading towards this streaming model being the default is only a step further in the obvious direction.
Maybe things are different now but I have never seen a single gaming cafe in my life where the games were "owned or licensed". We all know how they operated.
Not my experience - this place is long closed now, but a shop near me used to offer access to steam accounts that were managed through Steam's PC Café Program.
I totally agree with you. there's a cost benefit analysis we make when purchasing something and I can imagine the case where I'm ok paying 50c an hour for a remote game.
It's hard though not to see the writing on the wall in regards to "local compute GPU availability". Every single industry even tangentially related to compute power has "silently" moved their bus model to consumption based, despite the consumer base having 0 appetite for that. (We're not engineers/app developers who are forced to use LLM agents, we're trying to pay a service that hosts games.)
I am unsure how a medium that was a failure as a free/subscription model will succeed as a floating pay-as-you-go model.
For a period of time I would rent a windows box with gpu from aws, install my game, and play it over parsec (a Remote Desktop tool designed for low latency). It was around $0.40/hour for a high-end gaming rig for the ~40 hours I needed to binge my new game. I play new games infrequently, so the cost analysis was “a new computer for $1500, or rent one for the time I need it for $15.”
It’s just a bummer that this process wasn’t a bit easier. I recall there was some setup involved.
yep, actually in my area this will be cheaper than the gaming cafes people frequent—I think the lack of reasonably-local servers is the main thing that will block adoption.
I'm not so certain the average gamer is well-informed enough to realize what they're giving up, or that they feel strongly enough to take a stand for it if they do. I'm hopeful they will, we'll see.
Seems the important part is that Game Pass included Cloud Gaming. Now, they mostly strip it off (left few hours monthly) and charge it extra. In contrast, Sony still retains unlimited streaming in PS+.
Yup, the input lag is not something I can stomach. Even in pretty optimal network conditions, it's very noticeable. Other people may be less sensitive to it than me, so they may find this to be nice. I do worry about a longer term trend of pushing cloud over local hardware for gaming, which was never something I seriously considered until recently with hardware prices being what they are.
Hey technically we all made money on stadia. Bought the Cyberpunk 2077 bundle which came with a stadia kit with controller and chromecast 4k. For around $70-80 if memory serves me correct. Played it for a while and hated that the controller was wifi for direct stadia connection and only wired if I wanted to use it for anything else on my PC/phone. Sold the controller/chromecast bundle on ebay for $90. Continued to play Cyberpunk and Destiny2 over Stadia with mouse and keyboard until the service shutdown and Google refunded me for the original purchase.
The divide between those that can own their own consoles and those that are forced to feed the cloud quarter-by-quarter like an old-timey arcade is widening, and this sucks.
They want people with money to be the only people good at the games. The playing field will be: hours producing skill where skill is now weighted towards having more money because that’s how you get hours now. Weird take? Oh wait. :)
Ars Technica tends to use the most inflammatory, bad-faith headlines possible. They try to induce outrage in their audience, because this is what drives clicks.
I remember when PS3 online was free but enough XBOX Cawadoody Halo 2KSports gamers were happy to pay extra for… I’m not sure what… that it was normalized and so Sony got in on that too and made the whole industry more expensive.
Reminds me of the enshittttification of TV where every new system starts off ad free and then adds ads anyways.
How about someone capitalize on the billions of gigs of video card hardware available in these data centers to render and stream games of unfathomable amount realism?
> In September, when Microsoft severely limited the game-streaming buffet available to Game Pass subscribers, the company said non-subscribers would soon be able to “purchase cloud playtime hours through the Xbox Store and stream eligible games they own on supported devices.”
Game pass always has been a scam [0] for years and now here we have the ghost of Stadia in Xbox services as streaming games make it into non subscribers.
You will still own nothing, stream everything and be very happy when the game is simulated with a world model.
I'm sure game companies agree and realize those machines will be excellent clients for their game streaming service.
It probably isn't far off where AAA games are only available via streaming simply because not enough people are willing to buy $1500 consoles and $100+ games.
The two pillars of what made console gaming so enticing for years were cost and convenience. I love my gaming PC, but there is nothing as seamless as sitting on my couch, pressing the middle button on my PlayStation or Xbox, and jumping right back into a game that was in a quick suspend state. Even my PS4 still sees action due to the convenience factor.
Love my steam deck, but the dock/handheld experience isn’t as seamless as switch and flipping from desktop to gaming mode had a like 15% chance of freezing the device until maybe 18-24mo ago. There was also that update issue for years if you left your home network.
Xbox/Switch/Playstation are incredibly reliable and turnkey (and until recently, a low upfront cost). It’s why people turned to them by the millions.
> open but easy to use devices, like Steam hardware & co widely available
The problem was never the hardware. Consoles and PCs were both a compromise, a trade between convenience, flexibility, price. The easy to use devices from Steam are more console than PC and that's fine. Nobody has a problem with this as long as games run. If the game runs well I don't care about the CPU, RAM, OS, or that I can't upgrade them. I don't spend money on RAM for the sake of plugging things in, I spend it because the system needs it. The Steam Machine is a step towards "consolification" from a PC perspective. The Deck is a true console. So saying "finally consoles are gone" should be more "consoles are dead, long live consoles".
The big problem that only recently got prominence is ownership of the games. Take away the brand loyalty and you'll see that Steam isn't really doing much here. But I care about being able to buy and sell my games, or play them for as long as a compatible system is available. In this regard the Steam store is not much different from console stores. It offers some quality of life features but the core is still missing. It's not my game anymore and this comes with a lot of implications that aren't mitigated by running Linux or having RAM slots.
i find the entire concept alien and i have zero interest in becoming a customer in such models, so i'm not into it and i might be misinterpreting things, but aren't those games you never "bought" in the first place?
i mean, it sounds like it's a subscription plan and some extra session passes added on, not like you actually bought a game at any point, correct me if i'm wrong
No, this explicitly doesn't work for Game Pass. You can only play a selection of games you paid for (or free to play ones).
That means most of the average Xbox user's library is not supported, and if you're paying for Game Pass you almost definitely have a physical Xbox that can stream any game you have installed for free.
This has zero value for players. Streaming can have two business models - you pay a subscription to stream games you already own outside the platform like GeForce Now, or buy on the platform and stream for free like Stadia.
Xbox is charging per hour and making players buy games they already own through Game Pass.
Why do they keep stressing the "games you already bought!!!" part? There is no charge to play the game on your own hardware. This pricing is for renting the GPUs, same as GeForce Now and plenty of other services. And it's a pretty solid deal for people who don't want to build a multi-thousand dollar rig for gaming 10-20 hours a week.
GeforceNow is actually a weird service - you don't only rent the GPU. Nvidia needs to have a licensing deal with the game publisher you want to play (the game you already own). They removed quite a lot of games, because big names like ActivisionBlizzard, 2K and Bethesda withdrew licensing agreements. If I only rent hardware, I don't think I need permission by the IP holder whose software I intend to run there.
> If I only rent hardware, I don't think I need permission by the IP holder whose software I intend to run there.
I think unfortunately Aereo TV proved the opposite.
It sounds exactly how netcafes operate where the public can lease a computer and play games for a few hours. I don't think it's weird they have to get special licenses just like netcafes do.
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Because the model is diverged from the existing model Microsoft established via Game Pass, which made game streaming part of the licensing, not an add-on to purchasing.
Feels bad to buy an expensive piece of hardware, a $60+ game, and then be asked to pony up another hourly fee to play it on your tablet.
Of course, free game streaming was never a viable business model, so this isn't unexpected, but people aren't going to love the change either way.
If you buy the expensive piece of hardware and the game, you can play it on your tablet for free. With Remote Play! You've always been able to do that. Nothing changes.
This is about not buying the expensive piece of hardware. Then obviously it makes sense to charge you for the expensive hardware you're now using in the cloud. Or if you bought the expensive piece of hardware, but for some reason are choosing to use an Xbox in the cloud instead.
Game streaming from the cloud has never been part of the licensing of purchasing a game. It's always been part of a monthly Game Pass subscription. And with games in Game Pass, you don't even have to buy the game in the first place.
I get that some people may not love the change, but it's just more accurately reflecting costs, and there's absolutely no bait-and-switch here. Nothing has changed about what comes with a game you purchased. Nothing at all.
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>but people aren't going to love the change either way.
Perfect quote to summarize the direction of modern gaming. People are in stockholm syndrome over it though and aren't going to leave. Remember when Oblivion horse armor was over the line? Literally everything has gotten worse from that point despite no one being happy about it.
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Streaming games from your own Xbox is free. This service is for people who don't have that "expensive piece of hardware".
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That is not quite accurate -- the Game Pass library was a subset of what could be streamed -- things that were not available in Game Pass could still be streamed provided you owned them. When games went out of Game Pass you could purchase them and continue streaming.
Seriously! They're not charging you for the "streaming" or for the "game you already bought" -- they're charging you for renting the Xbox in the cloud that is running the game, the GPU.
I get that it was free before as part of a subscription, but now GPU's are more expensive. Nothing that you paid for up-front is being taken away. The subscription plans just changed is all.
> There is no charge to play the game on your own hardware.
well, unless you want to play some peer to peer multiplayer, then there is a sub you need to pay
That isn't specific to cloud gaming.
> Why do they keep stressing the "games you already bought!!!" part?
Because they're trying to push a specific narrative.
I strongly suspect that 'gamers rise up' style campaigns are promoted by the same people who promote the WEF as a boogeyman.
If they had charged people the economic price up front instead of intentionally bait and switching this wouldn't be controversial.
10-20 hours a week is a lot of gaming. Was it suggested that was a small amount and not worth the investment to have an actual machine? 10-20hrs over a month is more in the realm of streaming imo.
Quick math -
Xbox Cloud Gaming gives you 50 hours for $12. You could game for 3333 hours to equal the Xbox Series X in price ($800). Say you want to depreciate the device over 7 years, that's about 500 hours of gaming a year, or ~9-10 hours a week.
I'd say that's a pretty reasonable limit for a low volume, casual gamer.
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The average American watches 4 hours of TV per day!!!
Half of all Americans watch more…..
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Cannot wait for "they want you to pay for the gas to drive a car you already bought!"
In the case of Xbox, you'd get something comparable to Xbox Series X (or S in some situations). So it's hardly comparable to a multi-thousand dollar rig.
Yeah, it sounds like a reasonable deal to me.
> Why do they keep stressing the "games you already bought!!!" part? There is no charge to play the game on your own hardware.
Correct, that is why the "to stream games you bought" qualifier exists in the title :)
Rentals are not solid deals. They are designed to hamper ownership and force you to rent forever. At least be honest and say you think monopolies should be able to make hardware artificially unaffordable so people are forced to pay subscription fees instead.
> There is no charge to play the game on your own hardware.
They want to eliminate that. AIs will open source their games otherwise.
Not going to be viable for entire genres of games because latency.
AIs can't open source games, they can only assist in pirating them.
But pirates have historically done a pretty good job without AI.
Existing trends towards games with required online components, subscription-based content and microtransactions will no doubt continue, of course.
Not streaming, other than as an extra-cost option, because the margins on subscriptions and microtransactions are bound to be orders of magnitude higher while providing more value to the majority of players.
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"""Open sourcing""" (this needs maximum scare quotes) games by AI-washing the decompilation is legally just about the same as cracking. You won't be able to deploy the result on a walled garden console and most likely not for for money anywhere, and FOSS people won't touch it with a ten-foot pole.
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They will just eliminate "your own hardware".
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Because games couldn't be pirated before AI?
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Predicting it now that people will vibecode open source clones built from having bots play the closed game for training data.
And then one generation from now there are no more hardware consoles and you are stuck streaming games from the cloud from your thin-client smart TV. Yet another joy of actually having a physical thing taken away from us, yet again.
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For the time being Amazon Prime memberships (in the UK atleast) includes Luna a game streaming service.
You can link most Bluetooth controllers to your fire TV stick, or chrome browser and stream games.
Hogwarts Legacy is included in standard Amazon Prime and worth playing if you want some casual fantasy open world gaming.
While visiting not(USA) recently, found Xbox Cloud streaming no longer viable (lag fest) though last year travels (even over 5g hotspot) it was fine. Doesn't bode well for this streaming concept.
Looked for a real console and discovered all small shops and big box chains offer Nintendo and PS, none have Xbox. Speaking with managers revealed they or their suppliers "lost" or "ended" contracts to carry it.
Secondary market / used was dirt cheap – good condition consoles for less than a new controller: €35 for Xbox One S, €85 for Xbox Series S.
Smelled like a death spiral well underway.
The Xbox console is a pretty bad deal outside of the US because a lot of the software features (streaming apps etc.) don't work outside the US. Everyone buys PlayStation instead. Nintendo is of course doing their own separate thing focused on exclusive games.
Sounds fair. If you essentially already have a TV or other device as a thin client, I can see many people happily paying $12 for 50 hours compared to spending $1000 on the entire console
Yeah like the Google Stadia. I think there was news of someone who spent >100s of hours on Red Dead Redemption 2 only to have all his save data wiped when Stadia shut down.
Edit: Looks like Rockstar did the guy a favour and it was 6000 hours (https://www.nme.com/news/red-dead-redemption-2-stadia-player...)
Google Stadia was always doomed to fail because people have zero trust in Google keeping a service alive if it's not an immediate success.
This is from 2019: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/11/stadia-launch-dev-the...
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The stupid thing with Stadia is that every game you bought came with UNLIMITED FREE 1080p streaming.
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It will be $1/hour in a year. Then you will have to pay a different rate for better graphics. These things don't end well. Once they see that they have a stable customer base, they will figure out how to squeeze even more money from their customers. Of course, it will be advertised as something that the customers themselves required and they do it for them, not for themselves.
can't wait for the ad-fueled cheap tiers right when some games publish as streaming only
Once upon a time we spent quarters in the arcade faster than that.
If we did it in 1980 (I was doing it earlier than that), those each would be a dollar now.[0]
[0]: https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/
Then again, once the tolling infrastructure is in place and normalized, it’s all too easy to boil the frog…
Not for the Xbox though :/
I’m glad I got my series S for $300 when I did
The unfortunate reality is that all of the fun recompilation projects are helping seal the fate of us not being able to run games, or software in general, on our own hardware. The risk is very quickly becoming too great for proprietary software publishers in letting compiled artifacts land in customers' hands.
I feel GTA 6 will be the last mainline GTA that we run on our local systems.
That’s actually a really interesting take I hadn’t thought of. I’m involved in a decomp project (that to my knowledge is all human created) and knew there would be a legal reconning for AI powered projects, but I didn’t anticipate the business model changing to prevent near future releases from being preserved through fair use RE. What a bleak outlook.
This is not necessarily the case, as you still need to deliver an experience that customers enjoy and will pay money for. This means consoles that let them play games in their hands with the highest picture quality and lowest latency. No disruptions from poor wireless or significant interference in environments like apartment complexes.
Fully homomorphic encrypted processing may also become a norm and if that is combined with some games going back to being console only, there could be significant enough protection for games that contain trade secrets. That said, the days may be numbered for trade secrets at all given that better models may make today's clever trade secrets look juvenile.
At the same time, a lot of these games were already getting decompiled and inspected at runtime. That has historically been one part of the incentive to release games on console only or console first, particularly first party titles.
In any market where it's relevant to their business interests, they can still rely on the copyright laws and can set traps for any companies using decompiled code as part of their own paid and sold product. That whole process will become cheaper and easier to do as well, plus new approaches to slowing down or hindering the results of decompilation will become normal for games in mathematically provable ways. We've already seen approaches over the years like Denuvo.
Always online games themselves have benefited from some of their code being in the cloud and that will obviously be under fire more than ever with people writing their own servers, but even that might have novel approaches that can survive advanced tampering.
2018
-wake up feeling sick after a late night of playing video games
-excited to play some halo 2k19
-"xbox on"
-...
-"XBOX ON"
-"Please verify that you are "annon332" by saying "Doritos™ Dew™ it right!"
-"Doritos™ Dew™ it right"
-"ERROR! Please drink a verification can"
-reach into my Doritos™ Mountain Dew™ Halo 2k19™ War Chest
-only a few cans left, needed to verify 14 times last night
-still feeling sick from the 14
-force it down and grumble out "mmmm that really hit the spot"
-xbox does nothing
-i attempt to smile
-"Connecting to verification server"
-...
-"Verification complete!"
-finally
-boot up halo 2k19
-finding multiplayer match...
-"ERROR! User attempting to steal online gameplay!"
-my mother just walked in the room
-"Adding another user to your pass, this will be charged to your credit card. Do you accept?"
-"NO!"
-"Console entering lock state!" Nueva Yo -"to unlock drink verification can"
-last can
-"WARNING, OUT OF VERIFICATION CANS, an order has been shipped and charged to your credit card"
-drink half the can, oh god im going to be sick
-pour the last half out the window
-"PIRACY DETECTED! PLEASE COMPLETE THIS ADVERTISEMENT TO CONTINUE"
-the mountain dew ad plays
-i have to dance for it
-feeling so sick
-makes me sing along
-dancing and singing
-"mountain dew is for me and you"
-throw up on my self
-throw up on my tv and entertainment system
-router shorts
-"ERROR NO CONNECTION! XBOX SHUTTING OFF"
-"PLEASE DRINK VERIFICATION CAN TO CONTINUE"
I have a server running in my basement with 2 nvidia Tesla GPUs that I bought for ~$70 each on ebay. (Unfortunately the RAM cost an arm and a leg). I built it for inference, but I also set it up to run sunshine server and now I have my Steam library on the TV through a Raspberry Pi 3. Even better, it was a fun and interesting project, maybe not as straightforward as you think. Unfortunately it's entirely possible that it costs .24/hr just for the electricity.
Now, this feels fine with <10ms input latency over wifi. Even in 2026 I'm skeptical about sending my input to Atlanta and back.
Unless it’s a dumb TV you can just install the Steam app on your TV and avoid Sunshine and the Pi all together.
Are you locked into steam then? Or can you use it to stream other games, e.g. stuff bought on GOG?
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Except we literally just had stories about ... LG, was it? ... spying on everything - and the obvious way for that to happen is to plug your TV into the internet.
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> Unfortunately it's entirely possible that it costs .24/hr just for the electricity
Of course you don't need 2x teslas just to stream a game to your living room - a relatively power-efficient streaming box is possible
The raspberry pi is the actual device hooked up to the TV I think, the GPUs are elsewhere in the house.
The game runs on that pc in basement
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24 cents is like energy cost plus a dime for hogging a GPU for an hour.. not too bad?
Xcloud is about a RTX 3060 Ti which you can rent, including power and the rest of the system from $0.03 per hour as a spot price. At scale Microsoft should be able to be able to get a better price than just the hardware component.
Seems reasonable for your average user who games 10-12 hours a week and would not want to go through the hassle of owning and maintain a physical console (plus paying electricity on that).
When did owning a physical console become a hassle and require maintenance? I feel like I'm on crazy pills reading the comments in this thread. They can't be real.
It takes up space, you've got to clean out the dust from the fan grill every so often, it requires constant maintenance in software updates every time you turn it on, unless you leave it on all the time in which case it's using non-trivial power all the time. I have an Xbox. But there's no question that it would be a much simpler setup to not have one.
> Seems reasonable for your average user who games 10-12 hours a week...
"XBOX Game Pass Ultimate" gives you fifteen hours per month of "cloud playtime" for 23 USD per month. "XBOX Game Pass Essential" gives you five hours per month for 10 USD per month. [0][1] You are currently unable to buy more hours (or play for "free" by watching adverts!) unless you are an "XBOX Insider"... [2][5] but, let's assume that what's in the AT article is what "XBOX Insiders" are paying.
So, uh, this seems like -as the kids say- dogwater for "your average gamer who games 10-12 hours a week". Unless I've fucked up my math, for your forty hours of play time, you're paying between 22 USD (with an "Essential) subscription and 31 USD (with an "Ultimate" subscription) per month.
You're paying 260->370 USD per year for the ability to stream the games. If you buy your consoles used, [3] you're paying enough to buy one or two mid-end XBOXes or ~three low-end XBOXes every year. [3] If we go back to new prices in that distant year of 2025, [4] you're still buying an entire XBOX every year just for the privilege of being able to play video games for a handful of hours on Saturdays and Sundays.
Like the kids say... that's cheeks, bro.
[0] <https://www.xbox.com/en-US/xbox-game-pass/compare>
[1] <https://www.xbox.com/en-US/cloud-gaming#join>
[2] <https://support.xbox.com/en-US/help/games-apps/cloud-gaming/...>
[3] <https://www.gamestop.com/consoles-hardware/xbox-one/consoles>
[4] <https://web.archive.org/web/20250118085114/https://www.neweg...>
[5] Given that that "free" tier exists, no points shall be awarded to those who are able to predict what XBOX "cloud playtime" pricing trends are gonna look like over the next year or so... it's like dynamiting fish in a barrel.
Different from others, I don't think the price is fair. But also I don't know the cost structure well enough, I can have only an educated guess.
But what I am definitely afraid of is that they will want to charge games per hour anyway. The talks that consoles will cost 2000 USD is part of it. They don't want you to own things anymore.
You can't buy a house anymore, because they rather buy and keep it to create shortages and make you pay an absurd rent.
We should be talking more about how taxes should fit into this world where they are positioning themselves to not allow people to have things, not even the basic.
For examples, in the housing thing, it should not only have higher taxes for keeping properties empty but also it should be exponential otherwise it will become a cost to people. Making it exponential make it unviable. Also, investment funds should be much more regulated and should require approval for every transaction above a threshold (which imo should be small to close loopholes). This will slow things down enough.
The demand will still exist but companies will fill the gap. We should not be relying on one single investment fund to control your health, housing and employment.
We also should be discussing on closing all the gaps that ultra rich are using to not contribute back to the system they explore. They became leeches/parasites and not putting back the amount they should is causing them to be able to break the system more and more.
The only Pacific way right now is to boy;cott these big fellas. They got to comfortable saying that we are trash and the blame of everything is on us while doing everything they can to not even pay basic rights to employees.
I also think that if you know a trillionaire employee with a white collar, they also should get bit more pressure.
I know someone working in a company which recently caused hundreds of "collateral" deaths, and for him and everyone in the company, it is not their fault they exploded innocent people. We need to put these folks back to reality, because they are the same type of trash as we are, and they don't know it.
Now I guess it is obvious why they have been building so many bunkers lately. They were definitely conspiring.
(Btw, I have a strong feeling that sxai+t might become an investment fund with several companies, but that's another conversation)
Housing is largely restricted by local politics and zoning not corporate interests. There’s no conspiracy on that beyond crappy local politics.
Who do you think is paying to keep coming that way? Businesses that have an interest in keeping it that way, for example comercial realestate companies.
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turns out, 'you will own nothing and be happy' wasn't just a meme
It never was. They were pretty serious.
To be honest, this actually seems a bit understandable Unlike many things in gaming these days.
To be honest, I think you're saying something you know no one will agree with and smuggling it under the guise of your opinion.
I'm at a point where if I can't stream a modern game I don't play it. I play a few hours a week and don't want my laptop to get hot.
All the other games I play are 20+ years old and I play in a windows VM.
Seems pretty understandable to me too.
That just seems like such a strange offering. The number of supported devices is fairly low[0], and you already need to have purchased the game (well hold a license to the game). Some of the supported devices are Xboxes and some are Smart TVs, in that setup it would make more sense to have the TV use your own Xbox (assuming that they are on the same LAN).
The price seems a little high, as I expect them to be before tax and currency conversion, but mostly I struggle to see who this is for.
https://support.xbox.com/en-US/help/games-apps/cloud-gaming/...
How is this number "fairly low"? It supports every Windows and Mac PC, iOS, Android, Xbox, Quest VR and most major TVs and TV sticks. What exactly are you gaming on?
Okay, that might have been worded wrong. I don't the device selection as being particularly supportive of more than a few limited use cases. If you're at home it would make more sense to support your Xbox streaming to your VR headset or Smart TV, you shouldn't have to go via the cloud.
If you're out, on vacation or something, then sure streaming to your phone or tablet makes sense, but you're not going to sign in to a random Smart TV or PC with your Xbox account (at least Microsoft shouldn't encourage that behaviour). That just seems like such a limited use case to me.
Apparently there is no GNU/Linux support at all.
The logical conclusion of piracy and AI reverse engineering is that mire and more games will become streaming exclusives
No, there'll just be fewer big-budget games. Streaming is always going to be a sub-par experience (latency and video compression). And the mess that AI made of the hardware market has likely killed off (or at least indefinitely postponed) the next generation of games consoles
But we've got 4-5 decades of games to enjoy.
Part of the reason that the games industry is struggling is that there's been no real generational leaps for a long time. Gaming used to be driven by those technological leaps, but these days we just get incremental improvements. 10-15yr old games are just as entertaining as brand new releases and often don't look too dated.
Also, ever more people are getting into retro gaming, enjoying the classics from the 80s and 90s, from well before microtransactions and hyper-competitive online multiplayer.
Nevermind the generational leaps, there has been a lack of creativity and a flood of low quality titles that make it harder and harder to find the few good games among them.
I've had better luck finding great games I didn't know about from the 1990s than from the past twenty years.
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Is this a logical conclusion or is this correlation in a time when companies in myriad industries are pushing rent over buying because margins are so much better?
Piracy has been present since the advent of the personal computer and I think it's accepted by most that some people will pay, and others just won't. I'm not sure that AI reverse engineering changes this picture.
>Is this a logical conclusion or is this correlation in a time when companies in myriad industries are pushing rent over buying because margins are so much better?
I think both, I would argue that right now, giving hardware into the hands of your customer presents a much bigger risk nowadays. Streaming is obviously the better option for margins, and now it is basically the only option to keep the product under control. Also now that consumer GPU/memory is getting more and more expensive, I think it has become realistically the only way forward.
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The majority of console play time these days is spent in online multiplayer games. I don’t think AI reverse engineering will change that.
This, and the next generation of consoles being no less than 1600$/€ on day one.
Given they're moving to digital-only future I fully expect them to sell a "50$ + monthly subscription" dongle-like version of ps6 and xbox where you can play the game you buy as a streaming solution, or pay the aforementioned price for a "locally hosted" device on a console.
I can't see the next generation ever launching unless the market recovers.
And I'm not sure we're ever going to see cheap RAM or GPUs again. There's clearly more money to be made at current price levels, and not much potential for competition to fix the market.
They can certainly try but I'm not convinced that gamers are gonna latch onto the idea. Sure, a new GTA game might be able to do it to a certain level of success, but I'm not sure a Gears of War: E-Day will be able to get people to pay a constant subscription to stream it. Indie games will almost certainly not go streaming exclusive, so you'll now be competing even more fiercely with indies and older games.
Your "logical conclusion" ignores that many popular games rely on online content anyway. You still need their servers without needing it to be streamed.
> Your "logical conclusion" ignores that
Why did you have to phrase it like this, instead of just bringing up your own counterpoint?
Also, I'd see the concern here as where the code runs: if there is a dependency on the server to pull down code/assets, but it still runs it locally, then there is still an opportunity to pirate it locally - So this isn't a point about cloud-dependence, but AI/piracy specifically pushing execution to the server side.
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this isn't the way to defeat piracy
Can you walk us though your thought process here? Is piracy actually a problem? How is taking away ability to play offline a "logical conclusion"? Based on what evidence?
Corporations are monopolists and they are very angry about the fact you can just decompile any game and even port it to new platforms with AI.
I still miss Stadia.
It's crazy that after all this time, there still isn't anything that is better than it.
I bought one game and received a Chromecast Ultra and Stadia controller at no extra cost, then had the entire purchase refunded automatically years later. Great deal!
Didn't Nvidia make an alternative?
How does this compare to Geforce Now cost, where AIUI you also play games you bought?
GeForce Now is $9.99 for 100 hours of playtime (but the hours do expire)
Close in price, but 5080 is much faster than the Series S they use for streaming
Series S ? Not even Series X, Jesus the greediness.
With Reverse Engineer Anything it will be only a matter of time before it's the only way to play!
Will Reverse Engineer Anything also reverse engineer an xbox and materialize it out thin air? Because if not I don't see how that help.
MS is charging you 24 to 40 cent to rent a GPU so you can play without having to buy hardware, they aren't charging you to play your game on your own hardware.
I don't think this is inherently unreasonable, keeping in mind that gaming cafes are (perhaps quickly becoming a were) a thing, and in those you were usually provided some set of games that the center owned or licensed, but also allowed to log in via something like Steam and play your own games. Xbox / Consoles in general were already a walled garden compared to, say, GOG, and heading towards this streaming model being the default is only a step further in the obvious direction.
Maybe things are different now but I have never seen a single gaming cafe in my life where the games were "owned or licensed". We all know how they operated.
Not my experience - this place is long closed now, but a shop near me used to offer access to steam accounts that were managed through Steam's PC Café Program.
https://partner.steamgames.com/pccafe
For all the apologists and people saying it’s not a big deal:
The problem is that this is the entry point to do more nefarious things later
Companies love to boil the frog - introduce something and later jack up the price or take something else away or something like that
I at least am always weary of new stuff like this
Doesn't seem like much of a good deal relative to competitor services, especially GeForce now at 10 cents per hour
Want to sell mine, haven’t played it in over 2 years. Wish they’d send me the offer .
frankly, if I'm playing a game I own on a remote server, I expect to pay something for that
and I don't actually think that's substantially different from other competitors, like geforce now
whether I will choose to play it on a different server in the first place is a different question (I won't)
I totally agree with you. there's a cost benefit analysis we make when purchasing something and I can imagine the case where I'm ok paying 50c an hour for a remote game.
It's hard though not to see the writing on the wall in regards to "local compute GPU availability". Every single industry even tangentially related to compute power has "silently" moved their bus model to consumption based, despite the consumer base having 0 appetite for that. (We're not engineers/app developers who are forced to use LLM agents, we're trying to pay a service that hosts games.)
I am unsure how a medium that was a failure as a free/subscription model will succeed as a floating pay-as-you-go model.
For a period of time I would rent a windows box with gpu from aws, install my game, and play it over parsec (a Remote Desktop tool designed for low latency). It was around $0.40/hour for a high-end gaming rig for the ~40 hours I needed to binge my new game. I play new games infrequently, so the cost analysis was “a new computer for $1500, or rent one for the time I need it for $15.”
It’s just a bummer that this process wasn’t a bit easier. I recall there was some setup involved.
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yep, actually in my area this will be cheaper than the gaming cafes people frequent—I think the lack of reasonably-local servers is the main thing that will block adoption.
I'm not so certain the average gamer is well-informed enough to realize what they're giving up, or that they feel strongly enough to take a stand for it if they do. I'm hopeful they will, we'll see.
Seems the important part is that Game Pass included Cloud Gaming. Now, they mostly strip it off (left few hours monthly) and charge it extra. In contrast, Sony still retains unlimited streaming in PS+.
didn't realize that, though I wouldn't be surprised then if it also changes on sony's end
Yup, the input lag is not something I can stomach. Even in pretty optimal network conditions, it's very noticeable. Other people may be less sensitive to it than me, so they may find this to be nice. I do worry about a longer term trend of pushing cloud over local hardware for gaming, which was never something I seriously considered until recently with hardware prices being what they are.
I'd rather pay 40 cents per hour than have to pay really inflated prices for the games like Stadia had.
Ultimately, you end up paying for the usage somehow.
Hey technically we all made money on stadia. Bought the Cyberpunk 2077 bundle which came with a stadia kit with controller and chromecast 4k. For around $70-80 if memory serves me correct. Played it for a while and hated that the controller was wifi for direct stadia connection and only wired if I wanted to use it for anything else on my PC/phone. Sold the controller/chromecast bundle on ebay for $90. Continued to play Cyberpunk and Destiny2 over Stadia with mouse and keyboard until the service shutdown and Google refunded me for the original purchase.
Stadia didn't have infalted prices
wonder if they can bring the cost down. with all the streaming needed it may be possible to cut down on all the fancy graphical effects.
Isn’t that the appeal though, that you get AAA graphics on a phone? At least that’s why i used streaming.
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It's either that or a rumored $1200-$1800 for the next Xbox: https://www.techspot.com/news/114275-next-xbox-could-arrive-...
The divide between those that can own their own consoles and those that are forced to feed the cloud quarter-by-quarter like an old-timey arcade is widening, and this sucks.
$1200 translates to 5000 hours of streaming, so you have to play quite a lot before having your own console would be cheaper.
About 4 years if you play 4 hours everyday, with 128 days off during the 4 years.
But after 4 years you still have your own console that you can sell.
500 hours; sorry, we increased the price after streaming became the only option.
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Consoles don't go away when the subscription ends or when the company goes away or stops supporting it.
I know my N64 has more than 5000 hours on it, and I'm fairly certain it'll still be in working condition when I die.
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/s/consoles/whatevers/
/s/cloud/rentseekers/
Eventually, US intellectual property law will have the legitimacy of deeds for property on the Moon.
The Xbox reboot seems to be going well - but looks more like Xbox shutdown from the outside.
It's a bit of a mess at the moment, with the ExBox and the PwnedStation.
They want people with money to be the only people good at the games. The playing field will be: hours producing skill where skill is now weighted towards having more money because that’s how you get hours now. Weird take? Oh wait. :)
Ars Technica tends to use the most inflammatory, bad-faith headlines possible. They try to induce outrage in their audience, because this is what drives clicks.
I remember when PS3 online was free but enough XBOX Cawadoody Halo 2KSports gamers were happy to pay extra for… I’m not sure what… that it was normalized and so Sony got in on that too and made the whole industry more expensive.
Reminds me of the enshittttification of TV where every new system starts off ad free and then adds ads anyways.
Ah, so their game streaming platform is taking away from their AI inference business?
Microsoft is like a dog with a bone for set-top-box hardware.
They have failed at that service business several times over decades, and continue re-discovering customers don't like the sales model.
Someone has to pay for the over-provisioned data-center boondoggle, but note classic board games and cards are still fun. =3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtP39b5goxc
I can't buy a reasonably priced GPU to run games on anymore anyway
I prefer GOG. You buy it, it's yours.
How in any way your post is related?
How about someone capitalize on the billions of gigs of video card hardware available in these data centers to render and stream games of unfathomable amount realism?
It’s not unreasonable since you’re using their compute
I mean I would never stream a game, but still
You will own nothing and be happy
> In September, when Microsoft severely limited the game-streaming buffet available to Game Pass subscribers, the company said non-subscribers would soon be able to “purchase cloud playtime hours through the Xbox Store and stream eligible games they own on supported devices.”
Game pass always has been a scam [0] for years and now here we have the ghost of Stadia in Xbox services as streaming games make it into non subscribers.
You will still own nothing, stream everything and be very happy when the game is simulated with a world model.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33362792
With Sony's scheming and this, the high-end console industry is killing itself.
Finally. And nothing of value will be lost as a result, especially with open but easy to use devices, like Steam hardware & co widely available.
Alas, the signed-kernel-anticheat monster is approaching and, mark my words, will drag linux into an indistiguishable hell if it takes off.
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I'm sure game companies agree and realize those machines will be excellent clients for their game streaming service.
It probably isn't far off where AAA games are only available via streaming simply because not enough people are willing to buy $1500 consoles and $100+ games.
You mean Windows desktops, because Steam hardware depends on Windows game developers as source of games.
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The two pillars of what made console gaming so enticing for years were cost and convenience. I love my gaming PC, but there is nothing as seamless as sitting on my couch, pressing the middle button on my PlayStation or Xbox, and jumping right back into a game that was in a quick suspend state. Even my PS4 still sees action due to the convenience factor.
Love my steam deck, but the dock/handheld experience isn’t as seamless as switch and flipping from desktop to gaming mode had a like 15% chance of freezing the device until maybe 18-24mo ago. There was also that update issue for years if you left your home network.
Xbox/Switch/Playstation are incredibly reliable and turnkey (and until recently, a low upfront cost). It’s why people turned to them by the millions.
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> open but easy to use devices, like Steam hardware & co widely available
The problem was never the hardware. Consoles and PCs were both a compromise, a trade between convenience, flexibility, price. The easy to use devices from Steam are more console than PC and that's fine. Nobody has a problem with this as long as games run. If the game runs well I don't care about the CPU, RAM, OS, or that I can't upgrade them. I don't spend money on RAM for the sake of plugging things in, I spend it because the system needs it. The Steam Machine is a step towards "consolification" from a PC perspective. The Deck is a true console. So saying "finally consoles are gone" should be more "consoles are dead, long live consoles".
The big problem that only recently got prominence is ownership of the games. Take away the brand loyalty and you'll see that Steam isn't really doing much here. But I care about being able to buy and sell my games, or play them for as long as a compatible system is available. In this regard the Steam store is not much different from console stores. It offers some quality of life features but the core is still missing. It's not my game anymore and this comes with a lot of implications that aren't mitigated by running Linux or having RAM slots.
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Welcome to the new American economy.
The nickle and dime tax.
i find the entire concept alien and i have zero interest in becoming a customer in such models, so i'm not into it and i might be misinterpreting things, but aren't those games you never "bought" in the first place?
i mean, it sounds like it's a subscription plan and some extra session passes added on, not like you actually bought a game at any point, correct me if i'm wrong
No, this explicitly doesn't work for Game Pass. You can only play a selection of games you paid for (or free to play ones).
That means most of the average Xbox user's library is not supported, and if you're paying for Game Pass you almost definitely have a physical Xbox that can stream any game you have installed for free.
This has zero value for players. Streaming can have two business models - you pay a subscription to stream games you already own outside the platform like GeForce Now, or buy on the platform and stream for free like Stadia.
Xbox is charging per hour and making players buy games they already own through Game Pass.
Renting, it's renting the device.
You need to drill a hole into a concrete wall once - you rent the drill. You spend every day drilling countless holes - you buy the drill.
for the device, the analogy works better, like with coin op arcade machines back in the day
in this case, you're clearly not allocating a device for your sole usage for a given period of time; it's a gaming SAAS, which isn't really renting
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> Say what you will about the old arcade model, but you didn’t have to buy the cabinet and then pay a quarter per play
I'm unhappy that the Kinect got removed from the Xbox and with this sort of nonsense, I won't be purchasing any sort of replacement from Microsoft.
Oh no!
Anyway...
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This is likely to go hand in hand with them now encouraging people to sell their Xbox - https://gizmodo.com/xbox-trade-in-program-2000828278