5 hours of gameplay....a month. 10 hours....a month.

What even is this service for?

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

LOL 15 hrs a month at most?! So they don't want anyone to actually use this for gaming full time, I take it.

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.

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.

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.

Little too soon to attempt to slam the gates shut, no?

Microsoft: “We are under no obligation to refund you your tariff overpayments.”

Also Microsoft:

I'm glad my homegirl fitgirl doesn't limit my play time.

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.

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.

Asha is straight up bugging the fuck out. Time limits on play time what the fuck is even that?

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

This is "just" for cloud gaming right? Like if you install a game locally through game pass, these limits don't apply... Right?

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.

These services never were for me, I have good internet but the servers must be just too far away. But at these rates I'm not sure who this is for.

Wow those rates are outright stupid. Someone looked at those numbers and decided that was a good idea. Are they braindead or are they hoping for this to fail?

We recognize that introducing limits is a meaningful change, particularly for players who regularly spend more time gaming through the cloud. We expect this upcoming change to impact 4% of Game Pass subscribers.

You tell me only 4% of their audience plays more than 15 hrs in a month?

And, if so few subscribers are playing that much, why force new plans that cost more to limit people that weren't even stressing your network/capabilities?

I don't see how game streaming at least in the US market would ever work without higher performance infrastructure anyway. Functionally, it's not a matter of bandwidth but latency. Xbox servers are centralized regionally, so even with latency within WebRTC range (like sub-20ms), cross-country traversal can add up to 30ms which makes games feel awful in terms of control.

Play has no limi… oh..

Hey the thing everyone expected cloud/streaming gaming to do happened!... I sadly thought it wouldn't until mid 2027 or 2028

yo ho ho and a bottle of rum

I like GeForce Now but if this is where cloud gaming is going let me off the train.

They'll keep going until it's above the price of hardware ownership (a lot, these days), but fed in small enough increments that it's more affordable to the poor

That doesn't sound very "ultimate"

So, how long until they shove ads in for an extra hour of playtime?

"Because of the growing cost as more people use it for longer"

What's the over/under that the real reason is they're scavenging some of the servers for Copilot?

Great example of why cloud gaming should never be a thing.

That should be more than enough screen time for any gamer living a healthy balanced lifestyle. ^/s^

Yet they want all of it to go to cloud gaming, 15 hours is nothing.

Wow… fxxk ALL of that noise. Literally the only remaining sub I still have and Microsoft is going to push me off of that, too? Fine. Fxxk you, Microsoft.

anyone who gives money for this garbage deserves to get fucked

What the fuck am I supposed to do the rest of my weekend?

When does this shit start, I was stashing a few month long codes for a rainy gaming session.

Makes sense, doubt anyone who has time to play games daily really wants to stream

This is a feature I never used on Gamepass. I’ll continue to intermittently subscribe to play the big titles for a significant discount. If you don’t need to own absolutely everything that you play, the service still makes sense.

Certainly glad I only played Halo Campaign Evolved on GP because that game was not worth $50.

Hoping Gears of War is better but I’ll still only play it on GP.

lol

15 hours for the most expensive tier is absolutely ridiculous. At this point Microsoft would be better off making a separate Cloud Gaming subscription and maybe lowering the cost of the other tiers by a couple bucks.

15 hours a month is absolutely outrageous