And it’s this kind of shit that has ruined my love for tech. It’s all soulless dystopian slop they want you paying for monthly for the rest of your life. Fuck all these techno dweebs. It’s a shame all the normies will go along with this…
They’ll average $1700/year to play the fucking games they already spent $100 to borrow indefinitely? Fuck, gaming sounds so stupid now.
$1700/yr is 12 hours of gaming each day at $0.40/hr, which is more than the $0.24 you’d actually be paying. Nobody gaming that much would otherwise be spending $100/yr on games in any case.
This is a very stupid thing for the industry, but your numbers are hyperbolic and anti-useful.
ah but what about the hardware rental fees
Let’s say you play a game that costs 40c to stream, and it’s every day for a year; it will be ~400$
For 2-3 hours per day is what you mean I guess?
Because 400 is pretty close to the amount of days in a year, meaning you would have a bit more than a buck per day.
Yeah, and the shit is that it is 0.24 to 0.40, not just 0.24
If you refer to the article, it’s price tiering. You would be consistently paying $0.24.
“Indefinitely”, huh? They can just rent it forever? Sounds like a missed opportunity for shareholders, I bet we can get that line even higher
Indefinitely just means unspecified. Could be 3000 years, could be 15 minutes; it implies “until further notice” depending on the whims of the noticer. See “suspended indefinitely” in crime drama shows, where they’re back on payroll by the end of the episode
Well yes. Hence the joke
That’s why you ditch consoles, get a PC and buy only from stores that don’t do this rubbish.
Tech is still great but you have to know where to look and invest. Sony/MS have lost the plot that’s for sure, but the pc gaming ecosystem is vibrant, and there are amazing foss solutions to just about everything, including streaming.
Go along? They’ll be zealots demanding everyone get on board, just like heavily exploited console players are today.
I’ve called this so many times over… It’s not just going to be xbox… it’s going to be PCs in general, With AI data centers raising up the price on all hardware, They are already making moves in the government on banning routers. The plan is going to be for personal computers and hardware to leave the world. Either price them out of consumer reach or flat out outlaw them. We get thin clients like stadia, Luna etc… Actually having a personal computer capable of running software itself will be considered a national security threat. Why wouldn’t you keep your stuff in the cloud where the government can audit it, companies can make sure you aren’t pirating or running unapproved illegal LLMs that could make bombs etc…
Rent-seeking is definitely a sign of a financially-healthy company. Yup. No red flags there.
Rent-seeking is just late stage capitalism. You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy.
Microsoft has reinvented the arcade, except this time you buy the game first and then feed the machine quarters to play it. Next up: a premium tier that lets you pause without the meter running. At this rate, Xbox’s most profitable game will be watching customers try to escape the billing screen.
Next up: You get a free hour if you watch this AI slop ad. And since we’ve now required eye tracking to be enabled, if you look away from the ad for even a moment, then pay up.
DRINK VERIFICATION CAN
When the joke greentext becomes the torment nexus…
They had to feed the AI something to give the CEO ideas and all the reputable sites cost money so, really, it’s our own fault.
They played too much Roller Coaster Tycoon where they charged an admission fee for the park and then for every single ride too.
I’ve never paid a cent to stream anything. There’s all kinds of streaming everything that wants me to pay money to stream their shit. Guess what? No.
You can do it now. You’ll be able to do it in the future too. Movies, games, makes no difference. There are several lifetimes worth of games you can play without capitulating to the stupid late-stage capitalist bullshit that’s going on in this moment.
And it’s not always easy. I recently purchased a copy of Max Payne 3, a 14 year old game, because it was on sale for $7. After downloading, I discovered that it required me to register an account with Rockstar to play the single player campaign. I uninstalled it and got it refunded. I intend to pirate it now, out of spite.
Fuck these corporations. Don’t contribute to them. There’s plenty of other shit to do and there always will be.
Once again, I pray for the time when China floods the market with GPUs, RAM, and storage to the point where all these technocapitalists get fucked.
Fuck renting shit.
If they did that, the technocapitalists would just make Chinese hardware illegal.
If Americans cannot get their treats and the bread and Circus stops, then they will resort to other means of expressing dissent.
The USA is highly individualistic and materialistic. If they can’t get their treats, then stochastic crime will take place (not that I’m against that, fuck capital).
I totally agree, which is another reason we should not expect China to save us. Their ideal world is one where Americans finally take power from the capitalist class.
That’s my ideal world too though. You say that like it’s a bad thing.
Yes, it’s also my ideal world. Sorry if I came across as pro-capitalist 🤮
My ideal world is that but we immediately also start to undermine the Chinese as well through decentralized production and logistics so good it makes over seas shipping too expensive. Mind you I want that for the entire world, you cannot fathom the arousal I feel at the idea of a Trans-Berringia trains bridge to connect the logistics of the old and new world, also the Trans-African rail should be completed to such an extent that goods in the Congo are as cheap as goods in LA.
Exactly. And they will use the excuse that the chinese hardware might spy on us, all while the hardware they allow us to buy is doing that openly.
“Would?” They’re already doing that.
So much for free markets, eh? More like, we’ll invade or sanction whoever to have freedom in their markets, but the instant our markets can’t compete, all of a sudden regulation is good.
They can fuck right off…
Important point of clarification- this is about streaming from the cloud, using an Xbox or GPU in the cloud to play the game. This makes sense as buying the game or not, you are still using cloud resources.
Xbox Remote Play, which runs the game on your home Xbox and streams from your house to wherever you are, is free.
this makes sense
No it doesn’t
Well, what you say does, but running games in the cloud doesn’t make sense in any logical way except for that that the owner of said cloud will be walking to the bank laughing his ass off
Oh I agree paying to rent a cloud xbox when you have one sitting at home is fucking stupid. A lot of cloud everything is fucking stupid, and I say that as an IT person who’s been fighting cloud-itis since the term ‘cloud computing’ became a thing.
I see this as a feature most people wouldn’t actually use.
Only use case I’d have for it is wanting a game to render at higher specs while travelling at like a hotel.
I bought a steam deck for a vacation when it came out. Used it on the flight and that’s it. Never played games except at the airport so I was fine rendering at the steam deck.
Idk, I think you’re immediately jumping to the conclusions of “they’re trying to make us all rent everything”, which, while most likely isn’t wrong, is also obscuring some potential for “Hey look, I can play less-response-time-intensive xbox games on my fricking phone with good wifi, because of amazing compression technology”
This is an important note, the headline grabbed my attention but isn’t entirely accurate.
Ya at current memory and server gpu prices it wouldn’t surprise me at all if they aren’t even making any money at 40c/hr.
there was something the other day about microsoft having warehouses of GPUs for datacenters that arent even built yet.
They could probably take 1% of those to cover it without any additional costs for them.
They aren’t the same GPUs that are in Xboxs. those are nvidia GPUs eg the nv72 or gb300. There’s no way to make them compatible with Xbox. Source: my unc works at Microsoft data centers.
Why do they need to be compatible with an Xbox? They could just use the PC version for streaming
Xbox and PC versions aren’t exactly 1:1. Plus, those are extremely expensive GPUs to not be selling for top dollar to the AI bros instead.
Edit- I’m leaving out things like architecture, shaders, tensor cores, NVIDIA vs AMD, SXM vs PCI-E, etc.
those GPUs were sold for top dollar to AI bros.
its why microsoft has so many of them, sitting in a warehouse, waiting to be used, for stupid AI bullshit.
They are sitting in the warehouse because there aren’t enough other parts (e.g. DIMMs), power, or data centers for them. And as stupid as AI bullshit is, they are paying more than gamers by orders of magnitude.
Not 1:1 sure, but I’m struggling to think of a meaningful difference that would make the PC version an inferior one besides incompetent porting.
Xbox cloud servers are literally 5 motherboards: 1 management board and 4 Xbox ones. Developers can optimize for a single configuration rather than bake in support for multiple ones. Once it works on an Xbox dev kit, it works on all Xboxs including cloud, console, and handheld. SDKs are making that a thing in the past, but it’s not perfect.
Microsoft wants to never sell another product to me again? Fine
Stopped buying their garbage years ago.
that is correct.
they don’t want to sell.
they want to rent.
this is just another step down that path.
On top of the purchase price? Yikes, no thank you.
They can want it as much as they like, they can fuck off.
Jesus. I’m like all in on indie studios and old games. I don’t need this bullshit in my life. It’s already too much if a headache to comprehend what’s possibly worth it or not when you pay by the month or the hour to try and figure out budgets and so on. Cancel it all, play the old shit and pirate the rest.
Same
>laughs in piracy
Xbox Developers: Hell yeah! Playstation is shooting themselves in the foot. All we have to do is sit back and we’ll kill it.
Xbox Business : or… hold my beer.
