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.
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.
> 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.
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.
"""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.
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.
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).
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
Your "logical conclusion" ignores that many popular games rely on online content anyway. You still need their servers without needing it to be streamed.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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+.
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.
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.
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.
> In September, when Microsoft severely limited the game-streaming buffet available to Game Pass subscribers, the company said non-subscribers would soon be able to “purchase cloud playtime hours through the Xbox Store and stream eligible games they own on supported devices.”
Game pass always has been a scam [0] for years and now here we have the ghost of Stadia in Xbox services as streaming games make it into non subscribers.
You will still own nothing, stream everything and be very happy when the game is simulated with a world model.
i find the entire concept alien and i have zero interest in becoming a customer in such models, so i'm not into it and i might be misinterpreting things, but aren't those games you never "bought" in the first place?
i mean, it sounds like it's a subscription plan and some extra session passes added on, not like you actually bought a game at any point, correct me if i'm wrong
Yeah, it sucks. These are corporations whose business it is to restrict our freedom. Their software is literal malware meant to pwn our machine and restrict what we can do. Their invasiveness is the least of it.
I advocated so much against it. I was so sad when I saw that virtually nobody cared. It seems games are more important than freedom.
Well, some things are just not meant to be if we are to survive as a healthy society. We had feudalism, asbestos and lead in gasoline. If we could get rid of those, we can get rid of questionable totalitarianism peddling games as well.
I'm sure game companies agree and realize those machines will be excellent clients for their game streaming service.
It probably isn't far off where AAA games are only available via streaming simply because not enough people are willing to buy $1500 consoles and $100+ games.
Even consoles still rely on gamedevs running Windows to do the actual development. No reason steam boxes won't end up as a native target for those same developers, assuming Valve plays their cards right
> open but easy to use devices, like Steam hardware & co widely available
The problem was never the hardware. Consoles and PCs were both a compromise, a trade between convenience, flexibility, price. The easy to use devices from Steam are more console than PC and that's fine. Nobody has a problem with this as long as games run. If the game runs well I don't care about the CPU, RAM, OS, or that I can't upgrade them. I don't spend money on RAM for the sake of plugging things in, I spend it because the system needs it. The Steam Machine is a step towards "consolification" from a PC perspective. The Deck is a true console. So saying "finally consoles are gone" should be more "consoles are dead, long live consoles".
The big problem that only recently got prominence is ownership of the games. Take away the brand loyalty and you'll see that Steam isn't really doing much here. But I care about being able to buy and sell my games, or play them for as long as a compatible system is available. In this regard the Steam store is not much different from console stores. It offers some quality of life features but the core is still missing. It's not my game anymore and this comes with a lot of implications that aren't mitigated by running Linux or having RAM slots.
The two pillars of what made console gaming so enticing for years were cost and convenience. I love my gaming PC, but there is nothing as seamless as sitting on my couch, pressing the middle button on my PlayStation or Xbox, and jumping right back into a game that was in a quick suspend state. Even my PS4 still sees action due to the convenience factor.
Love my steam deck, but the dock/handheld experience isn’t as seamless as switch and flipping from desktop to gaming mode had a like 15% chance of freezing the device until maybe 18-24mo ago. There was also that update issue for years if you left your home network.
Xbox/Switch/Playstation are incredibly reliable and turnkey (and until recently, a low upfront cost). It’s why people turned to them by the millions.
Then they will point to people not buying and blame anyone but themselves lol. I can’t imagine even thinking about the PS6. The PS5 is basically a final fantasy machine. The library is pathetic compared to PS4. And Xbox…come on. Rumors of $1600-$1800 price tag? I built a PC for less. Used to be you couldn’t build a comparable PC for a console’s price until easily 3-4yr into the console cycle.
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.
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.
Streaming games from your own Xbox is free. This service is for people who don't have that "expensive piece of hardware".
> 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.
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.
> There is no charge to play the game on your own hardware.
They want to eliminate that. AIs will open source their games otherwise.
"""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.
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.
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).
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).
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.
> 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.
>produce a legally clean open source game engine
I'll take "Shit people on the orange site say" for $200 Alex.
Because games couldn't be pirated before AI?
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.
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.
Predicting it now that people will vibecode open source clones built from having bots play the closed game for training data.
> Why do they keep stressing the "games you already bought!!!" part?
Because they're trying to push a specific narrative.
> 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 :)
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)
Housing is largely restricted by local politics and zoning not corporate interests. There’s no conspiracy on that beyond crappy local politics.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
turns out, 'you will own nothing and be happy' wasn't just a meme
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
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...)
The stupid thing with Stadia is that every game you bought came with UNLIMITED FREE 1080p streaming.
They certainly made a loss on this guy but it is far from "stupid" from a consumer perspective.
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...
Another 2019 classic https://www.reddit.com/r/Stadia/comments/ceuy4w/comment/eu56...
Once upon a time we spent quarters in the arcade faster than that.
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/
Then again, once the tolling infrastructure is in place and normalized, it’s all too easy to boil the frog…
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.
Not for the Xbox though :/
I’m glad I got my series S for $300 when I did
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.
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.
> 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
The raspberry pi is the actual device hooked up to the TV I think, the GPUs are elsewhere in the house.
The game runs on that pc in basement
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.
The logical conclusion of piracy and AI reverse engineering is that mire and more games will become streaming exclusives
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.
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.
It seems to me that the indie games scene has shown quite a lot of creativity.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
The majority of console play time these days is spent in online multiplayer games. I don’t think AI reverse engineering will change that.
Your "logical conclusion" ignores that many popular games rely on online content anyway. You still need their servers without needing it to be streamed.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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/...
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?
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.
Apparently there is no GNU/Linux support at all.
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.
Stadia didn't have infalted prices
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.
How does this compare to Geforce Now cost, where AIUI you also play games you bought?
Close in price, but 5080 is much faster than the Series S they use for streaming
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)
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.
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.
from your perspective this feels like a positive, then, no? cheaper price per hour, no requirement that you use those hours all at once?
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.
agreed
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.
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+.
didn't realize that, though I wouldn't be surprised then if it also changes on sony's end
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.
The Xbox reboot seems to be going well - but looks more like Xbox shutdown from the outside.
It's a bit of a mess at the moment, with the ExBox and the PwnedStation.
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.
$1200 translates to 5000 hours of streaming, so you have to play quite a lot before having your own console would be cheaper.
500 hours; sorry, we increased the price after streaming became the only option.
Yeah, those are "introductory prices", after all...
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.
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.
/s/consoles/whatevers/
/s/cloud/rentseekers/
Eventually, US intellectual property law will have the legitimacy of deeds for property on the Moon.
It’s not unreasonable since you’re using their compute
I mean I would never stream a game, but still
> In September, when Microsoft severely limited the game-streaming buffet available to Game Pass subscribers, the company said non-subscribers would soon be able to “purchase cloud playtime hours through the Xbox Store and stream eligible games they own on supported devices.”
Game pass always has been a scam [0] for years and now here we have the ghost of Stadia in Xbox services as streaming games make it into non subscribers.
You will still own nothing, stream everything and be very happy when the game is simulated with a world model.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33362792
Oh no!
Anyway...
i find the entire concept alien and i have zero interest in becoming a customer in such models, so i'm not into it and i might be misinterpreting things, but aren't those games you never "bought" in the first place?
i mean, it sounds like it's a subscription plan and some extra session passes added on, not like you actually bought a game at any point, correct me if i'm wrong
Renting, it's renting the device.
You need to drill a hole into a concrete wall once - you rent the drill. You spend every day drilling countless holes - you buy the drill.
With Sony's scheming and this, the high-end console industry is killing itself.
Finally. And nothing of value will be lost as a result, especially with open but easy to use devices, like Steam hardware & co widely available.
Alas, the signed-kernel-anticheat monster is approaching and, mark my words, will drag linux into an indistiguishable hell if it takes off.
Yeah, it sucks. These are corporations whose business it is to restrict our freedom. Their software is literal malware meant to pwn our machine and restrict what we can do. Their invasiveness is the least of it.
I advocated so much against it. I was so sad when I saw that virtually nobody cared. It seems games are more important than freedom.
Would like to see the ability to boot into a secure system that only has the game and maybe discord.
Would like these corporations to just accept they have no control and stop trying to "secure" themselves against us.
Quite a few billion dollar games that can't function then.
Well, some things are just not meant to be if we are to survive as a healthy society. We had feudalism, asbestos and lead in gasoline. If we could get rid of those, we can get rid of questionable totalitarianism peddling games as well.
That kills so many valid setups that it's a complete non-starter.
I'm sure game companies agree and realize those machines will be excellent clients for their game streaming service.
It probably isn't far off where AAA games are only available via streaming simply because not enough people are willing to buy $1500 consoles and $100+ games.
You mean Windows desktops, because Steam hardware depends on Windows game developers as source of games.
Even consoles still rely on gamedevs running Windows to do the actual development. No reason steam boxes won't end up as a native target for those same developers, assuming Valve plays their cards right
The difference being no AAA studios are targeting Proton on purpose.
As for Valve itself, many probably won't find Valve that great when the new management generation takes over, and is no longer Gabe calling the shots.
> open but easy to use devices, like Steam hardware & co widely available
The problem was never the hardware. Consoles and PCs were both a compromise, a trade between convenience, flexibility, price. The easy to use devices from Steam are more console than PC and that's fine. Nobody has a problem with this as long as games run. If the game runs well I don't care about the CPU, RAM, OS, or that I can't upgrade them. I don't spend money on RAM for the sake of plugging things in, I spend it because the system needs it. The Steam Machine is a step towards "consolification" from a PC perspective. The Deck is a true console. So saying "finally consoles are gone" should be more "consoles are dead, long live consoles".
The big problem that only recently got prominence is ownership of the games. Take away the brand loyalty and you'll see that Steam isn't really doing much here. But I care about being able to buy and sell my games, or play them for as long as a compatible system is available. In this regard the Steam store is not much different from console stores. It offers some quality of life features but the core is still missing. It's not my game anymore and this comes with a lot of implications that aren't mitigated by running Linux or having RAM slots.
The two pillars of what made console gaming so enticing for years were cost and convenience. I love my gaming PC, but there is nothing as seamless as sitting on my couch, pressing the middle button on my PlayStation or Xbox, and jumping right back into a game that was in a quick suspend state. Even my PS4 still sees action due to the convenience factor.
Love my steam deck, but the dock/handheld experience isn’t as seamless as switch and flipping from desktop to gaming mode had a like 15% chance of freezing the device until maybe 18-24mo ago. There was also that update issue for years if you left your home network.
Xbox/Switch/Playstation are incredibly reliable and turnkey (and until recently, a low upfront cost). It’s why people turned to them by the millions.
It seems like the industry is on a quest to see what's the maximum price that people will pay for convenience
Then they will point to people not buying and blame anyone but themselves lol. I can’t imagine even thinking about the PS6. The PS5 is basically a final fantasy machine. The library is pathetic compared to PS4. And Xbox…come on. Rumors of $1600-$1800 price tag? I built a PC for less. Used to be you couldn’t build a comparable PC for a console’s price until easily 3-4yr into the console cycle.
> Say what you will about the old arcade model, but you didn’t have to buy the cabinet and then pay a quarter per play
I'm unhappy that the Kinect got removed from the Xbox and with this sort of nonsense, I won't be purchasing any sort of replacement from Microsoft.