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.

  • qarbone@lemmy.world
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    13 hours ago

    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?

    • ampersandrew@lemmy.worldOP
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      12 hours ago

      Cloud play is one feature of Game Pass, but for most, I suspect the main draw is downloading a game and playing natively when it’s an option. It’s not a surprise to me that 96% of players are not playing more than 15 hours per month on cloud.

  • LettyWhiterock@lemmy.world
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    22 hours ago

    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?

        • ampersandrew@lemmy.worldOP
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          20 hours ago

          To my eye, all of the moves Xbox has made lately is to package up something that someone else can afford to buy off of Microsoft’s hands, and that includes selling them a subscription service that brings in more money than it costs. That’s only conjecture, but it seems to fit.

  • darkmogool@feddit.org
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    1 day ago

    Sorry, but why does someone would pay for this? Being limited in playtame AND over a $/h? There are shure enough people who opt in… or still not opt out after this…

  • LiveLM@lemmy.zip
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    3 days 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.

  • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
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    3 days 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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      3 days 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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        3 days 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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    3 days 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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      3 days ago

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

  • Prox@lemmy.world
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    3 days 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.

  • Katana314@lemmy.world
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    2 days 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.