Microsoft is making a controversial change to the Xbox Cloud Gaming allowance, and it’s going to leave a lot of Game Pass subscribers, including me, pretty miffed. So far, Microsoft has offered an unlimited number of play hours for cloud gaming to Xbox Game Pass subscribers. Well, the honeymoon period is finally ending.
Starting in November, Xbox will limit cloud gaming to just five hours for customers on the Game Pass Essential plan, while those who pay for Game Pass Premium will only have an allowance of ten hours. Users who pay cash for the top-tier Game Pass Ultimate subscription will get just 15 hours of cloud gaming budget each month.
The move is not surprising, but the monthly cloud gaming allowances are a tad too restrictive. Back in December, NVIDIA announced that you can only enjoy cloud gaming on GeForce Now for 100 hours each month, with the ability to roll over up to 15 hours of play time into the next monthly cycle. Microsoft, on the other hand, is allowing 15 hours worth of cloud gaming each month in total.
But why?
“We’re introducing this model because the cost of providing cloud gaming grows as more people use it and play for longer. Moving to monthly limits allows us to keep offering the service while continuing to invest in its reliability and performance,” the company said in an official blog post.
The shift is not entirely unexpected, as the AI boom keeps boosting cloud infrastructure costs and hardware components, specifically memory modules and GPUs, keep getting pricier. Merely two months ago, Amazon’s gaming chief said in an interview that the rising cost of consoles will push more gaming fans toward cloud-based services such as Xbox Cloud, Nvidia’s GeForce Now, and Amazon’s own Luna platform.
“I’m skeptical that it will immediately push more players to the cloud quickly, but I do predict a gradual adoption of alternatives,” Jeff Gattis, the lead for Amazon Luna and Amazon Game Studios, told the BBC. It now seems that cloud gaming will get more expensive, as well, while the next-gen consoles from Microsoft (Xbox Project Helix) and Sony’s PlayStation 6 are staring at an almost certain generation-over-generation price hike.
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