Xbox wants you to pay 24 to 40 cents per hour to stream games you bought (arstechnica.com)

289 pointsby entryleveljobsc21 hours ago258 comments

paxy 20 hours ago

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.

matheusmoreira 20 hours ago

> There is no charge to play the game on your own hardware.

They want to eliminate that. AIs will open source their games otherwise.

ahartmetz 19 hours ago

"""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.

matheusmoreira 19 hours ago

Illegality isn't going to stop anything. It's going to happen regardless.

Fixing this requires the end of free personal computing as we know it today. Every computer must become a walled garden. Everything the word "hacker" ever stood for must be destroyed.

ahartmetz 19 hours ago

It is going to happen, but mostly for older games to keep them playable and maybe to get console exclusives to PC. It doesn't make sense to compete with the copied games because it's illegal. It doesn't make sense to "crack" the games like that because one can just crack the original games the usual way (probably with AI support, but that doesn't matter).

jasomill 19 hours ago

Sure, but illegality means it's not going to happen commercially.

And the game industry has continued to grow in spite of rampant piracy for decades, so there's not much to change here other than a slight reduction in the value of console exclusives if they can be easily vibe ported to PC (but the majority of players will play them on console anyway, as is the case with current console platforms that are easily emulated like Switch).

sleepybrett 12 hours ago

.. yeah because that has put a stop to all the iptv providers.

malwrar 19 hours ago

Predicting it now that people will vibecode open source clones built from having bots play the closed game for training data.

paxy 19 hours ago

Because games couldn't be pirated before AI?

matheusmoreira 19 hours ago

Copyright infringement has always been trivial, but the same couldn't be said about reverse engineering. AIs changed that. The market fot remakes and ports is now threatened. Instead of just waiting ages for some company to port their games to PC, people can just do it themselves.

jasomill 18 hours ago

AI or otherwise, porting and QAing a title is orders of magnitude more difficult than downloading a cracked copy of an existing port.

So at most, vibe ports will marginally lower the value of platform exclusives, and lead to fewer exclusives and/or shorter exclusivity periods.

I, for one, have no problem with this outcome.

jasomill 19 hours ago

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.

matheusmoreira 19 hours ago

> AIs can't open source games, they can only assist in pirating them.

AIs should be able to use the same clean room reverse engineering techniques humans use in order to produce a legally clean open source game engine that can use the original game's copyrighted assets.

shakna 12 hours ago

... A clean room, means that you aren't reverse engineering. You're producing the same result, with zero awareness of the process, or it isn't a clean room.

LLMs are created through mass ingestion of data, and so, by definition, cannot be a clean room. They are trained on the things that they're tasked with copying.

solyin 10 hours ago

How is Claude going to be trained on GTA5'S game engine source code if it's closed source?

jerf 10 hours ago

It isn't that it will have been trained on the source code. The "decompilation" craze has it in the name... it is being done by decompiling the game and then modifying it. I don't think it's even a question as to whether or not the game companies are going to come down hard on this and I would not recommend to anyone that they jump up and volunteer to be the legal test case for that.

A clean-room implementation is going to be much, much more effort than a "decompilation". Even a decompilation is, I think, more than the hype is claiming. You can't just point at a game, say "decompile it and make it work on Windows" and get a result in one shot. It will take playtesting, cycling around, QA, and time to polish it up. But that will still itself be much easier than an actual clean room implementation. Let alone getting sued by the owner anyhow and having to prove it was clean room in a typical chaotic individual dev environment.

zdp7 9 hours ago

It's not though. We get the machine code for programs we run on our PCs. All the logic is provided to the end user. The only protection these days, is not doing all the game logic on the end users PC.

russelg 6 hours ago

Well funny enough, the code for GTA5 did leak not too long ago...

matheusmoreira 10 hours ago

How could the possibly have been trained on the proprietary source code of games made many years ago?

shakna 4 hours ago

How could they have trained on books that they didn't buy or source from libraries?

I'm afraid, the companies in question, have been more than happy to ingest pirated material.

beenBoutIT 4 hours ago

The reality is that proprietary HW from past console generations can be significantly improved and made less expensive via modern tech advancements to provide a superior gaming experience without load times or latency. A $200 modernized PS2 or $100 modernized SNES will dominate gaming long before streaming does.

jrootabega 10 hours ago

They will just eliminate "your own hardware".

dawnerd 6 hours ago

Or if you do own the hardware it'll be a simple thin client.

phyzix5761 20 hours ago

> Why do they keep stressing the "games you already bought!!!" part?

Because they're trying to push a specific narrative.

4thguy 19 hours ago

> 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 :)

swiftcoder 19 hours ago

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.

paxy 19 hours ago

Streaming games from your own Xbox is free. This service is for people who don't have that "expensive piece of hardware".

swiftcoder 18 hours ago

> This service is for people who don't have that "expensive piece of hardware".

Right, but those people also don't own Xbox games. So this goes from "add-on fee to play the games your already own conveniently", to "buy a $60 game and then pay $/hour to actually play it"

Are you saving money in the second scenario vs buying a console? Almost certainly. But it doesn't feel that way to the person paying a big whack upfront and then also stacks of game time.

paxy 17 hours ago

There's no need to overcomplicate it with "feelings", the math is fairly straightforward. The cost of games is the same in either case. Beyond that you either pay $800-$1000 for a console/$2000+ for a gaming PC, OR $10-20/mo for cloud gaming. Depending on your needs #2 might be the better option, which is why services like GeForce Now are so popular.

swiftcoder 13 hours ago

> There's no need to overcomplicate it with "feelings", the math is fairly straightforward

It turns out that the customer's perception of a product is pretty vital to its performance in the marketplace. The math can math just fine, but if the customer doesn't feel good about it, you don't make the sale.

Subscriptions try to soften the blow of a big purchase by lowering the monthly payments under your "casual expenditures" threshold. Upfront payments reward you with an immediate sense of ownership, and no recurring anxiety about affording the item.

Combining the two in this particular order is sort of the worst of both worlds - there's a reason car loans are always low monthly payments to start, with a balloon payment at the end, when you are maximally invested...

metaphor 8 hours ago

> there's a reason car loans are always low monthly payments to start, with a balloon payment at the end, when you are maximally invested...

What (where?) in the world are you even talking about?

Aurornis 4 hours ago

> there's a reason car loans are always low monthly payments to start, with a balloon payment at the end, when you are maximally invested...

Balloon payment loans are very rare in the United States. I don't know where you live but I don't think you realize how unusual balloon payment loans are.

swiftcoder 2 hours ago

They are the default in much of Europe, though the expectation is that you'll likely trade the car in when the balloon comes due.

dahcryn 9 minutes ago

not in my part of europe?

torben-friis 9 hours ago

Not present in the math is that the cloud gaming service is able (and likely) to raise prices substantially, worsen the service or simply disappear.

One of the silver linings of a subscription model is that you're able to stop paying and move when it's no longer interesting, here you're asked to invest in a platform that can be taken from you.

paxy 9 hours ago

What are you investing in exactly? You can pay $10/mo while the service is good, and then stop. The games you buy are still yours.

swiftcoder 2 hours ago

> The games you buy are still yours

Are they really? You will "own" digital licenses to the games, but you will not have any way to play them once you stop paying for the subscription.

That doesn't feel like "ownership" to me...

johnisgood 2 hours ago

They can be taken away from you at any point by locking your account for whatever.

You often cannot run even single player games without having connected to Steam (no need for account to be locked for this, but requires connectivity for one).

Multiplayer games almost always require Steam these days.

I used Steam as an example but applies to other platforms as well.

So yeah, I would say you pay for the license only, and you do not own the games at all, not anymore, and this has been true for a long time now.

torben-friis 41 minutes ago

>The games you buy are still yours.

They're not yours. Can you resell and recoup? Nope, digital licenses.

Can you buy a 2k computer and play them? You can't or won't, that's the whole reason you're using this system instead.

So you effectively have 60 bucks per game as a moat to hold you in while they boil the water.

codebje 9 hours ago

I tried #2 from here in Australia, but the experience was incredibly poor despite fibre to the home at 500mb/s. You'd be better off buying one of the gaming mini-PCs with 32GB DDR5 and a 760/780M iGPU for ~3-4yrs worth of monthly costs, but the Vimes theory of economics might prevent that.

(I wound up building a gaming PC, much more capable but much more than the cost of streaming over an equivalent lifetime - IF streaming services don't enshittify to cost more and deliver less over time, which we all know they will.)

asdff 12 hours ago

>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.

hbn 11 hours ago

Basically everything Microsoft (deservedly) got shit for with the Xbox One, and which their reputation never recovered from, is bog-standard practice on consoles and plenty of games now.

asdff 11 hours ago

I can't even remember what MS did or didn't do in that keynote. Are they really hurting in this gen? I think their success vs PS is all about (lack of) good platform exclusives along with how online gaming got more siloed and less communal. Halo 3 won them the north american market and it wouldn't have been the same without all chat and everyone still having a working mic at that point in the 360s life.

jbm 11 hours ago

The announced a few things.

1. Concentrating on Cable (LOL in retrospect, but controlling the living room was always the plan so I get it) 2. Getting rid of physical games

chocochunks 9 hours ago

Xbox One was originally going to require frequent online check ins, I think daily or weekly, games on disc were going to tie themselves to your account and publishers could choose whether or not you could resell them at select retailers or share them with your friends, IIRC you could share a game one time with a friend. They also didn't focus on games when showing it off and it was priced $100 higher than PS4 despite being weaker because of the bundled Kinect nobody wanted.

They are not doing super amazing this gen. Reports have them selling 1/3rd the units of PlayStation 5, Game Pass has stalled, they apparently used a JIT manufacturing setup and so were much more affected by the component shortage, so a console that was $500 at launch is now $800.

Funnily enough, because they put in serials into Xbox One games for tracking they did recently launch a really cool disc to digital service that gives the best benefits of physical and digital.

overfeed 11 hours ago

> People are in stockholm syndrome over it though and aren't going to leave.

People usually dont - until the levies break, and they do. The PlayStation 4 won its generation, because people left XBox for it, in part, over game sharing (or lack thereof)

asdff 11 hours ago

It feels like PS4 winning was more a result of the halo 3 world of all chat staying in lobbies xbox live dying than anything else. PS3 outsold xbox outside North america too so its really only a regional phenomenon. Hard to really articulate what a social phenomenon halo 3 was in its time. We all just assumed every new game would be like this going forward, but there was never a game like it since. Communities too fractured into different nonexclusive IPs. Death of allchat and staying in lobbies and no one bothering with the mic anymore. No more interest in offering stuff like custom game tools or mapmakers like forge. No fileshare like what bungie.net had for clips and maps.

So shocking in hindsight how ms never realized this formula as it was happening and let it wither on the vine.

pipes 11 hours ago

People are happy enough to spend their money on it though. (Personally I'm amazed people pay money for some different coloured pixels in a game, but in general I don't really like modern games. I aged out somewhere around the PS2 era and now mostly buy from gog.com or play emulators: I'm not the target market!).

asdff 10 hours ago

Yeah I don't understand the skins/cosmetics stuff at all, just seems lost on me and gamers of my generation. Always shocking to me when I see gamers online complain about say the lack of compelling cosmetic offerings in the in game store, as if that's a big selling point of the game for them. I always use default skins. Earned skins are another story, I'll use those because they mean something. Purchased skins though is almost like stolen valor.

buran77 9 hours ago

Microsoft remembers that just a few short decades ago you'd pay a coin that was usually worth more than today's quarter to play at the arcade and got far less than an hour for it. You owned nothing and were happy for it.

A lot of big tech companies want to bring back those time because they believe the few decades in between where people owned and controlled their devices and software in a very open computing ecosystem were a mistake. So the aim now is to give you a device you pay for and use but never fully control, and software or media that you rent but never own.

somenameforme 4 hours ago

It seems businesses also believe this, even when it's plainly not true.

---

PS1 = 102 million units sold

PS2 = 160

PS3 = 87 million

PS4 = 117 million

PS5 = 95 million (June 2026)

---

These numbers would be bad alone, but two things make them especially awful. The first is that there's no meaningful competition anymore. XBox has completely dropped the ball whereas the PS2 initially had the original XBox (which wasn't great, but had novelty going for it), Dreamcast, GameCube, and others all viably competing in the same approximate domain.

The second is that when the PS2 launched in 2000 the US population was 281 million. Now it's 349 million. I'm using US as a proxy for rest of the world, instead of the global population, since we're mostly interested in the developed world as that's the market for game consoles. So the break-even point in terms of marketshare relative to the PS2 would be 349/281*160 = 199 million units sold, and that's if we assume significant competition.

So not only are people leaving consoles, they're leaving in droves. And that leaves the companies squeezing their shrinking player bases even harder, which will make people leave even more quickly. They've lost around 50% of their adjust playerbase over the past 20 years, and at this rate I doubt game consoles will even exist in 20 more years.

Narishma 4 hours ago

You missed the biggest reason the newer consoles couldn't reach PS2 numbers: Sony managed to bring its price all the way down to $99. PS3 and PS4 only went down to $299. PS5 instead has had multiple price increases and is now way more expensive than it was at launch.

somenameforme 3 hours ago

While this is true and has special reasons this gen, the PS4 was 'normal' except there was another difference there as well. Prior to the PS4, companies subsidized hardware to an extreme degree. For instance in the original XBox the video card in that system was worth significantly more than the entire console's MSRP.

But from the PS4 onward, the consoles were made of a relatively lightly modified retail hardware that was sold for profit as quickly as possible. Both the PS4 and PS5 were being sold for profit (on the hardware), less than a year after launch. I think this was due to again companies squeezing a shrinking playerbase even harder, to try to maintain profit levels.

I think the obsession on next quarter, while pretending that there's no such thing as long-term consequences, is eating companies alive. Because there are absolutely long-term consequences.

anankaie 10 hours ago

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.

crazygringo 8 hours ago

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.

athrowaway3z 2 hours ago

There is no bait-and-switch, but this is going to change things.

The industry is scared of recompiling and how AI has driven costs for people to host their own servers. That includes games like GTA where a lot of recurring revenue is from people spending money in online mode.

Microsoft would "solve" that issue, as well as normalize more players to spend monthly instead of once.

“Nothing changes” for your DVD/CDs when Netflix and Spotify arrived.

I personally have my doubts this is going to work, but the thing this model does open up is mainstream games having LLM driven NPCs.

InsidiousWombat 11 hours ago

> 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

paxy 9 hours ago

That isn't specific to cloud gaming.

squidlib 11 hours ago

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.

testing22321 9 hours ago

The average American watches 4 hours of TV per day!!!

Half of all Americans watch more…..

OJFord 7 hours ago

Is that statistic active watching, or skewed by those that leave it on 24h news or shopping or whatever 24/7?

wasmitnetzen an hour ago

"Average" probably means the mean here, not the median. So it's not half who watch more than that. There's probably a big gap between the mean and the median. Nobody publishes the median because that number is published by the ad industry which has no interest in showing the lower median.

paxy 8 hours ago

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.

mrheosuper 4 hours ago

That heavily assumes MS does not increase the price, which has been proven to be false when they increase Gamepass price in the past.

jeppester 10 hours ago

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.

crazygringo 8 hours ago

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.

roosterIllusi0n 8 hours ago

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.

menshiki 6 hours ago

Yeah, it sounds like a reasonable deal to me.

anigbrowl 4 hours ago

I strongly suspect that 'gamers rise up' style campaigns are promoted by the same people who promote the WEF as a boogeyman.

throwaway85825 4 hours ago

If they had charged people the economic price up front instead of intentionally bait and switching this wouldn't be controversial.

pdntspa 3 hours ago

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.

rimliu 2 hours ago

Cannot wait for "they want you to pay for the gas to drive a car you already bought!"

littlecranky67 2 hours ago

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.

charcircuit an hour ago

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.

littlecranky67 an hour ago

Well it is bad user experience. While GeforceNow allos me to connect my steam and epic account, the list of games actually playable is not my collection there, but the subset of games nvidia has a licensing deal (a lot less). Also they are free to remove support for games - as happened when big players withdrew their licensing.

I've seen tech videos from LTT and alike where they build remote gaming rigs using windows Hyper-V with GPU passthrough to the guest - that is essetially what they should do, and let me rent a virtual machine with hardware support and low latency video compression. I don't see a reason you would need any licensing deals there.

whatevaa an hour ago

Do you need to have purchased the game at those cafes? Cause you do at geforce now. Game publishers who withdrew from geforce now are just greedy.

dtech an hour ago

That is very different, because the netcafe own those games. This would be like needing to rent the computer at the cafe, bringing your own purchased game, but then the netcafe also needs a license to allow you to play your own games at the computer.

jjpones 20 minutes ago

There are a few models.

- They have majority of popular games already installed but you need to log in to your own steam account and only have access to the games you already own.

- They provide an in-house account and offer games available in that account to be played. This is usually for cafes offering playtime for console games.

- Partnerships with games studios/publishers, but really I only know about this in Korean PC Bangs for specific games where some content is locked. For example in League of Legends, you unlock playable characters over the course of playing the game so a low level account might not have the full roster unlocked. If you log in your account to affiliated PC Bangs, you have all characters unlocked while playing there.

ThatPlayer an hour ago

> 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.

VierScar 8 minutes ago

Why would companies withdraw licensing agreements? They get money from Nvidia and also from the consumer that has to buy the game separately.

They certainly aren't launching it on a different game-streaming service or intending to compete with it. Withdrawing doesn't make customers buy more of their games either - probably less.

So why would they be withdrawing from licensing agreements that are effectively free money for them?

Terretta 20 hours ago

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.

td521534f12 6 hours ago

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.

rustyhancock 44 minutes ago

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.

ChrisRR 20 hours ago

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

Forgeties79 20 hours ago

I’m glad I got my series S for $300 when I did

geocar 20 hours ago

Once upon a time we spent quarters in the arcade faster than that.

brycewray 17 hours ago

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/

password54321 20 hours ago

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...)

Hamuko 20 hours ago

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...

lelandfe 20 hours ago

Another 2019 classic https://www.reddit.com/r/Stadia/comments/ceuy4w/comment/eu56...

TiredOfLife 19 hours ago

The stupid thing with Stadia is that every game you bought came with UNLIMITED FREE 1080p streaming.

password54321 18 hours ago

They certainly made a loss on this guy but it is far from "stupid" from a consumer perspective.

genxy 8 hours ago

Youtube comes with "free 1080p" infinite streaming and it makes double digit billions a year.

chii 7 hours ago

You can't be interrupted with ads every few minutes when gaming.

0cf8612b2e1e 7 hours ago

File serving is cheap vs rendering a game. A single core can serve many video streams but may be insufficient to run even one game.

alwa 20 hours ago

Then again, once the tolling infrastructure is in place and normalized, it’s all too easy to boil the frog…

dfedbeef 20 hours ago

Not for the Xbox though :/

pllbnk 18 hours ago

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.

autuni an hour ago

can't wait for the ad-fueled cheap tiers right when some games publish as streaming only

beefsack 6 hours ago

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.

jonhohle 6 hours ago

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.

CMay 5 hours ago

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.

SOLAR_FIELDS 20 hours ago

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"

trey-jones 20 hours ago

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.

swiftcoder 20 hours ago

> 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

wildzzz 19 hours ago

The raspberry pi is the actual device hooked up to the TV I think, the GPUs are elsewhere in the house.

TiredOfLife 19 hours ago

The game runs on that pc in basement

swiftcoder 19 hours ago

Yes, I understand that. My point is that 2x Teslas are overkill for gaming - his power bill is so high because he's using an expensive ML inference box to stream games.

ajcp 6 hours ago

Unless it’s a dumb TV you can just install the Steam app on your TV and avoid Sunshine and the Pi all together.

esperent 6 hours ago

Are you locked into steam then? Or can you use it to stream other games, e.g. stuff bought on GOG?

jeroenhd 2 hours ago

Steam can stream any game, but non-Steam games do need to be set up on the computer to launch through Steam to work properly.

t-writescode 4 hours ago

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.

rmunn 2 hours ago

Correct, it was LG — though I see no reason to assume that other smart-TV manufacturers aren't doing similar things. Perhaps not quite as egregiously as LG, where the TV's microphone was picking up conversations in the room even when the TV appeared to be off (but was actually in standby mode). But I would assume that if a smart TV from any brand is connected to the net, it's transmitting data home about what you watch, what ads you sat through vs fast-forwarded, and so on.

zombocomvibes 2 hours ago

24 cents is like energy cost plus a dime for hogging a GPU for an hour.. not too bad?

charcircuit 2 hours ago

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.

motbus3 20 hours ago

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)

ianm218 20 hours ago

Housing is largely restricted by local politics and zoning not corporate interests. There’s no conspiracy on that beyond crappy local politics.

lp92 20 hours ago

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.

postingawayonhn 20 hours ago

Real estate development is a pretty competitive business with few barriers to entry. Nobody controls enough of the market to make it worth trying to restrict other developers.

In most cities it's developers who are pushing councils/government to rezone land so they can secure additional development sites.

tamcap 20 hours ago

Based on my personal observations, most of the local zoning restrictions in the US come from conservative local residents, and not a cabal of developers. The latter want to build.

And I am using the word conservative in the non-political sense here - opposed to change. The individual motivations are many, but ultimately, a lot of people tend to avoid change around where they live.

motbus3 19 hours ago

In large cities, housing is now being built specifically for rent, and there are many early sales opportunities available exclusively to companies. In certain cities of Ireland, it is common for a new block of apartments to be sold out within the first hour. You get in a queue to visit on the first day and you don't even have a chance.

Schiendelman 12 hours ago

Right, that's because of the political system you guys created with local councils. There's a reason it's worse there than even in the United States.

ianm218 20 hours ago

I don’t think so - those companies are atleast modestly pro growth. They want to do more projects. In NYC and Boston local residents talk about “evil developers” who want to replace vacant lots with homes and businesses

motbus3 18 hours ago

I don't know about Boston case, but in Ireland it is common for developers to build and investment funds to buy it all in closed door meetings. So your only option is to rent. In other places of the world where I lived, it was common to rent a completely different region to only find out later the company letting the house/apartment belonged to the same group.

ianm218 11 hours ago

> Ireland’s planning and zoning framework is widely regarded by economists and housing experts as one of the most restrictive, bureaucratic, and hostile-to-development systems among developed common-law nations [1]

So Ireland made it almost literally illegal to build anything and it sounds like that led to bad behavior? Yes Ireland should fix corruption around building but they should also allow people to build homes.

[1]. https://www.centreforcities.org/reader/a-zoning-system-for-e...

WillPostForFood 12 hours ago

Do you think commercial real estate are backing maintaining single family zoning in places like Palo Alto, or do you think they'd actually benefit from tossing all the zoning, and being able build, sell, and rent as many office buildings and apartments and condominiumns as possible?

thousand_nights 20 hours ago

turns out, 'you will own nothing and be happy' wasn't just a meme

motbus3 11 hours ago

It never was. They were pretty serious.

threepts 10 hours ago

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).

Mistletoe 9 hours ago

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.

crazygringo 8 hours ago

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.

simoncion 9 hours ago

> 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.

ilikeitdark13 11 hours ago

To be honest, this actually seems a bit understandable Unlike many things in gaming these days.

bentograd 11 hours ago

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.

kulahan 9 hours ago

Seems pretty understandable to me too.

mrits 9 hours ago

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.

mrweasel 20 hours ago

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/...

paxy 20 hours ago

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?

mrweasel 19 hours ago

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.

apopapo 19 hours ago

Apparently there is no GNU/Linux support at all.

bananzamba 20 hours ago

The logical conclusion of piracy and AI reverse engineering is that mire and more games will become streaming exclusives

password54321 20 hours ago

Your "logical conclusion" ignores that many popular games rely on online content anyway. You still need their servers without needing it to be streamed.

Chris2048 20 hours ago

> 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.

password54321 18 hours ago

Treating anti-consumer practices as the "logical conclusion" while failing to give one is annoying. What you stated doesn't solve the fact that many people want to play games with others online, it is not just about assets.

bluescrn 20 hours ago

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.

BoxwoodSeed 20 hours ago

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.

mlok 19 hours ago

It seems to me that the indie games scene has shown quite a lot of creativity.

BoxwoodSeed 13 hours ago

But how do you discover the good ones?

joenot443 11 hours ago

Top ten lists written by indie gaming bloggers for each year/genre are a good place to start, honestly.

If you like 2d platforming exploration types, try Hollowknight, Celeste, VVVVVV, Ori, Animal Well. Each one is fantastic.

joenot443 20 hours ago

The majority of console play time these days is spent in online multiplayer games. I don’t think AI reverse engineering will change that.

easyThrowaway 20 hours ago

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.

bluescrn 20 hours ago

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.

Hamuko 20 hours ago

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.

izacus 20 hours ago

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?

matheusmoreira 20 hours ago

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.

jnsie 20 hours ago

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.

entropi 20 hours ago

>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.

odo1242 12 hours ago

Server GPU/memory has also been getting more expensive along with normal customer stuff. Hyperscalars with a lot of hardware do try to keep prices constant for a bit (since prices for hardware they bought is amortized), but they too are bound by economic markets and have to raise prices.

redanddead 11 hours ago

this isn't the way to defeat piracy

ChildOfChaos 14 hours ago

I still miss Stadia.

It's crazy that after all this time, there still isn't anything that is better than it.

redanddead 11 hours ago

Didn't Nvidia make an alternative?

lapetitejort 10 hours ago

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!

zurn 20 hours ago

How does this compare to Geforce Now cost, where AIUI you also play games you bought?

TiredOfLife 19 hours ago

Close in price, but 5080 is much faster than the Series S they use for streaming

mrheosuper 4 hours ago

Series S ? Not even Series X, Jesus the greediness.

odo1242 11 hours ago

GeForce Now is $9.99 for 100 hours of playtime (but the hours do expire)

neuwirth 20 hours ago

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.

paxy 20 hours ago

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.

forsalebypwner 16 hours ago

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

mkotlikov 6 hours ago

With Reverse Engineer Anything it will be only a matter of time before it's the only way to play!

sailingparrot 6 hours ago

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.

gxs 12 hours ago

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

odo1242 12 hours ago

Doesn't seem like much of a good deal relative to competitor services, especially GeForce now at 10 cents per hour

conductr 11 hours ago

Want to sell mine, haven’t played it in over 2 years. Wish they’d send me the offer .

bjord 20 hours ago

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)

Reubachi 20 hours ago

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.

brody_hamer 20 hours ago

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.

bjord 20 hours ago

from your perspective this feels like a positive, then, no? cheaper price per hour, no requirement that you use those hours all at once?

Reubachi 20 hours ago

It's a positive in the sense that the industry has made it marginally cheaper in time/resources to pay-as-you-go.

It's a positive in the sense that due to these industry changes (computer power going up 20x in cost.), the platforms are offering a way to let us peons play games.

It's a negative in that it's a futher commitment of these vendors to hoarde compute/GPU power from western consumers and chinese LLM vendors. MS will routinely purchase the highest end GPU for sake of keeping this service alive, nevermind their own LLM. Good luck getting one yourself.

bjord 19 hours ago

agreed

simoncion 8 hours ago

> ...a new computer for $1500...

How often do you buy new computers? I paid something like 2500 USD for my Threadripper machine (including 128 GB of RAM and graphics card) ~seven years ago. Between now and then I paid ~580 USD (at the end of last year) to get a new graphics card and that's it. After last year's upgrade, I've yet to run into a game that it doesn't play reasonably, and I've also gotten a lot of work done with it over all the years I've had it.

The console lifecycles being like a decade long has been a fantastic blessing for us PC gamers. Most AAA games are intended to run well on those ancient almost-PCs, which means that our old actually-PCs usually play the games just fine.

bjord 20 hours ago

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.

forgotpwd16 20 hours ago

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+.

bjord 20 hours ago

didn't realize that, though I wouldn't be surprised then if it also changes on sony's end

OGWhales 20 hours ago

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.

schnitzelstoat 20 hours ago

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.

TiredOfLife 19 hours ago

Stadia didn't have infalted prices

officeplant 16 hours ago

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.

krystalgamer 20 hours ago

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.

__m 7 hours ago

Isn’t that the appeal though, that you get AAA graphics on a phone? At least that’s why i used streaming.

kotaKat 20 hours ago

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.

gspr 20 hours ago

/s/consoles/whatevers/

/s/cloud/rentseekers/

danbruc 20 hours ago

$1200 translates to 5000 hours of streaming, so you have to play quite a lot before having your own console would be cheaper.

skyyler 20 hours ago

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.

danbruc 19 hours ago

Do most people keep their old consoles or do they generally replace them with a newer one? And even if they keep them, do they actually use them or do they end up in the attic? And I guess you could always get one ten years after the release for little money.

pirates 16 hours ago

I keep every single one and if there’s a game I want to play that I already own I’ll play it on its original console instead of emulating it or buying a remake/remaster. When I have company over everyone has a great time re-discovering the things we loved about them and appreciating the advancements we’ve made. There is something different about passing the controller around between levels on Mega Man X or playing Melee on its original hardware.

danbruc 11 hours ago

I have no doubt that people do this, I also still have my Game Boy and Mega Drive lying around somewhere, but the question is whether this is common.

gregoryl 20 hours ago

500 hours; sorry, we increased the price after streaming became the only option.

kotaKat 19 hours ago

Yeah, those are "introductory prices", after all...

mrheosuper 4 hours ago

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.

ocd 20 hours ago

Eventually, US intellectual property law will have the legitimacy of deeds for property on the Moon.