According to their blog post, Xbox is set to introduce a limit on the amount of hours players can stream their games through their Cloud Gaming services and it has left us confused.
Going forward, not only will you still need to pay for a Game Pass subscription, but depending on the tier you are on, you will be given a different limit monthly:
- Game Pass Ultimate: 15 hours
- Game Pass Premium: 10 hours
- Game Pass Essential: 5 hours
We recently talked about how good Xbox Cloud Gaming can be, and how it rivals the traditional experience if you have the right internet speed. The biggest appeal for it, in our opinion, was that it was a nice extra that gave you more out of buying games on Xbox.
Unfortunately, that won’t be the case anymore if these limits do go ahead. Game Pass is not free, especially Ultimate which costs a lot of money. In fact, even Xbox’s upcoming game selection on Game Pass isn’t anything to write home about. In a month of big releases, there is barely one major title.
If it was something like 15 hours a week, that wouldn’t have been so bad but 15 hours isn’t even enough to let you finish a major game. Technically, this means that people who subscribe to Game Pass and enjoy its cloud gaming features will effectively be getting a price hike.
In the blog Xbox mentions how the cloud services make gaming a more affordable feature in markets where consoles are less available or affordable but their actions suggest otherwise. At this point people are better off just getting an Xbox on installments than paying double to just play games on cloud.
We can understand that streaming technology isn’t cheap anymore but this shows a lack of control from Xbox with their own services. In fact, moves like this have us more worried for gaming’s future, and we wouldn’t be surprised if companies like Xbox and PlayStation would rather stop selling consoles altogether and instead rent out hours of gameplay.
We genuinely think that Xbox needs to massively increase the limit offered with Game Pass Ultimate at minimum, otherwise with both a lacking library of games and heavily limited cloud gaming, Game Pass stops making a lot of sense.
