Microsoft has announced that starting in November one of Game Pass‘s big advantages, the cloud streaming service, will be severely limited. Users of the service will have a limited number of hours to use the service, with the option to buy more hours in the store so they can keep playing if they want to increase their available time. The breakdown of available hours is as follows, depending on the subscription tier:
- Game Pass Essential: 5 hours
- Game Pass Premium: 10 hours
- Game Pass Ultimate: 15 hours
Another important change is that, from now on, all users will be able to make use of Xbox’s cloud gaming service even without an active Game Pass account. To do that they will only have to buy playtime in the Xbox Store to use the service occasionally.
The reason for these changes, according to Microsoft, is because “the cost of offering cloud games increases as more people use them and play for longer. Moving to monthly limits allows us to keep offering the service while we continue investing in its reliability and performance. We understand that for some players the practical result is a higher cost”.
A service that yields tremendous profits
All this doesn’t square with the profits Microsoft is currently making from Azure servers, where its streaming services run. With $29.4 billion in sales in the last four months, it is far from AZS’s 42.2, but it was ahead of Google’s 24.8. So it seems that its need to keep cloud costs under control isn’t necessarily what’s actually going on. Still,, Game Pass, starting in November, will be worse than it is today.
