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.
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.
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.
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.
I remember when Stadia came out and I was like uh... how does buying games on here work? What happens when they deprecate Stadia? So I bought one $5 game. Then they deprecated it and I got a refund.
It will be $1/hour in a year. Then you will have to pay a different rate for better graphics. These things don't end well. Once they see that they have a stable customer base, they will figure out how to squeeze even more money from their customers. Of course, it will be advertised as something that the customers themselves required and they do it for them, not for themselves.
similar to how Netflix offers 4K but at much lower bitrate when compared to Blu-ray. the engineers have spent a considerable amount of time optimizing the encoding presets to be acceptable by the majority of their audience.
even though phones have 1080p resolutions, the pixel density is so high you could get away with the more minute detail that would be obvious on a 24' screen.
currently Xbox games are made to be played on regular monitors the devs are optimizing for that.
No, there'll just be fewer big-budget games. Streaming is always going to be a sub-par experience (latency and video compression). And the mess that AI made of the hardware market has likely killed off (or at least indefinitely postponed) the next generation of games consoles
But we've got 4-5 decades of games to enjoy.
Part of the reason that the games industry is struggling is that there's been no real generational leaps for a long time. Gaming used to be driven by those technological leaps, but these days we just get incremental improvements. 10-15yr old games are just as entertaining as brand new releases and often don't look too dated.
Also, ever more people are getting into retro gaming, enjoying the classics from the 80s and 90s, from well before microtransactions and hyper-competitive online multiplayer.
This, and the next generation of consoles being no less than 1600$/€ 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
The ones built into the TVs suck because they don't get updated and are usually really slow and choppy to use. Everyone I know who doesn't use an HTPC, uses an Xbox or PlayStation to watch stuff.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's fair, and honestly is my preference as well.
On top of that, the Steam App is a bit janky, so much so that I just hauled my gaming rig out, plugged it directly into the TV, set Steam to launch at start-up in Big Picture Mode and bam, good to go.
> 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
Physically xcloud runs on Series X boards where each board is software divided in 4 Series S. When you stream a game you have sole usage of the 1/4 of the phisical device
like with any SaaS, but what you're charging is not remotely amortisation plus a profit margin - that barely enters the equation, hence why it's a bit of a stretch to call it renting
No, this explicitly doesn't work for Game Pass. You can only play a selection of games you paid for (or free to play ones).
That means most of the average Xbox user's library is not supported, and if you're paying for Game Pass you almost definitely have a physical Xbox that can stream any game you have installed for free.
This has zero value for players. Streaming can have two business models - you pay a subscription to stream games you already own outside the platform like GeForce Now, or buy on the platform and stream for free like Stadia.
Xbox is charging per hour and making players buy games they already own through Game Pass.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
The 360 was winning hard early in the 7th console generation, between the success of Xbox Live/popularity of Halo 3 and Sony's $500 starting price for the PS3 that made the Xbox's $300 starting price look great.
But later on in the generation, Sony made big price cuts and went hard putting out very good exclusive games that people bought systems for. By the end, they beat out Microsoft in sales.
Then the lead-up to the Xbox One launch was such a PR disaster which the another comment covered. The PS4 continued getting great exclusive games while Microsoft's big IPs like Halo and Gears of War more or less fell out of relevancy if not had their brand destroyed by new entries that didn't impress fans. They spent way too much time and effort trying to make the Kinect the future of Xbox in hopes of replicating Nintendo's success with the Wii, years after the novelty of motion controls stopped impressing anyone.
The unfortunate thing is they dropped the ball so hard that Sony basically stopped trying in the latest generation. Sony is pissing people off left and right but they're still winning because they have no direct competition (Nintendo has been off doing their own thing since the Wii)
> 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)
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!).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
PlayStation sells better in Europe than it does in North America. XBox sells better in North America than it does in Europe, but has never sold as well globally as the PlayStation of its generation:
It could be more interesting to look at all the consoles, not only the playstations.
N64/PS1/Saturn: 146 million units sold worldwide
GC/PS2/Dreamcast/Xbox: 214
Wii/PS3/Xbox 360: 275
WiiU/Switch/PS4/Xbox One: 338
Switch 2/PS5/Xbox Series: 150
So since only the last generation has lower number of units sold, it seems to me that the market for console is either only recently declining, or the cycle is much longer and people takes more time to buy the new generation.
I'd be interested to know how complex the modelling behind this is for the companies involved, what reasons they think are behind changes and what levers are within their reach to pull (and what's outside their control).
One aspect that springs to mind immediately looking at that timeline is the rise of mobile, it wouldn't have happened immediately at launch (around 2007) but has been a building wave that meant practically everyone has a games device in their pocket. For audiences of certain genres is all they need where they might have contributed to the overall picture of dedicated gaming devices, leaving other gamers and companies to balance the books for other genres that are left.
I think the most practical issue is that we're not talking about companies per se, but individuals. And the time horizon of any given individual tends to be much less than the time horizon of a company. So imagine you're an executive at XBox, and find yourself in charge of their games division. Your performance is going to be measured based on your results over the next quarters where the next few years would be 'long term.' And so your actions are going to be geared towards maximizing returns over that window.
'Shareholder value' is another problem. Shareholders, in general, do not hold shares of companies because they want those companies to succeed, but because they expect returns from those companies. If they can get a 50% return and then have the company die in a fiery blaze, most shareholders would be perfectly fine with that so long as they were reasonably confident that they wouldn't, themselves, get burnt. So you have shareholders with no interest in the long-term similarly aligned with executives who have no interest in the long-run.
There's also probably more technical issues like discounting earnings over time. A penny earned today is generally considered significantly more valuable than a penny earned tomorrow by companies due to inflation, opportunity cost, and other such issues. So even if you think the long-term is relevant, the expected earnings cost would have to be dramatic to make it comparable to the impact of next quarter.
Yeah I was also thinking about going this direction, because shrinking marketshare in a much larger market would paint a different picture. The reason I don't think this is as informative is because of what I alluded to with 'the same approximate domain.' The Wii took a radically different path than Sony/Microsoft. It had terrible graphics, terrible performance, weird controls, and was much more gamer friendly - full backwards compatibility (at first...), no monthly fee to use your own internet connection, and so on.
I'd also observe, vice versa, that after Nintendo jumped on the bandwagon of charging players to use their own internet connection that their sales started declining significantly. I don't know if it's causal; even people who chose to opt out themselves might not even really know. What I mean is that this feeling of getting nickeled and dimed is going to imperil fun in some impossible to quantify fashion, and if these various actions hit another completely unquantifiable breaking point, then you start losing players in yet another unquantifiable way - until suddenly you notice that people just don't seem to want what you're offering anymore.
> People are in stockholm syndrome over it though and aren't going to leave.
.
Over the last year several people I know have independently told me console gaming just "isn't really as fun as it was." They're all buying fewer games and spending less time playing them (GTA6 will be an exception but for two of them it's the only console game they'll buy this year).
One is doing physical board games others are exploring retro gaming through emulation and loving it.
I mean, why play games on expensive hardware when there’s decades of critically acclaimed games that will run on hardware like your phone? There are more great games out there than any one person can reasonably play.
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.
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 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 purchase. Nothing at all.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
Just a correction: Netcafes don't have to get special licences. I'm not aware of any such licences existing anymore. They just buy however many standard retail copies or online accounts they want. Sometimes a publisher will see the marketing value and will provide some copies/licences at no charge.
Going back 15-20 years or so, Valve used to run a "Cybercafe Program" that was a large monthly expense for cybercafes, but shut it down after a while because it wasn't worth the cost of administration. Now cybercafes buy Steam accounts same as any end user. Asking any publisher for a cybercafe or "commercial exploitation" licence always invoked the response "Um - no idea?" from any department you asked, coupled with "We're afraid to suggest anything" from the legal department and "just use standard copies I suppose?" from the marketing department.
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?
if we've learned anything from movie and show streaming then yes, publishers will absolutely all start their own game streaming service if it ever takes off. nice that Microsoft is building a gaming monopoly, can't have multiple platforms if there's only one mega-publisher.
Studios that gets purchased by these mega-publishers have always experienced enshittification, so the fact that they might make their slop streaming-only doesn't really bother me.
We'll be fine as long as we have an open platform to play good games from studios that haven't sold out, and without interference of anti-competitive gatekeepers, but we need to defend our right to use these open platforms - definitely the PC, and if we could find a way to align, I think we could regain ground on android/ios as well.
> we need to defend our right to use these open platforms - definitely the PC
coming from someone who thought they'd refresh their PC in 2026 (planned this in 2024), i agree. getting priced out feels like the first step in the wrong direction.
Game streaming services like that are harder to reliably hardware fingerprint and introduces unusual install patterns (same game potentially repeatedly installed large amount of times by same user).
For DRM and ban avoidance detection this means either false positives (which is bad rep) or if it's tuned to ignore those signals on specific service provider hardware makes it easier to do account sharing (and thus not buying the game).
I always assumed that the streaming services had negotiated to receive DRM-free versions specifically to avoid this issue, similar to the DRM/telemetry-free versions of Windows used on air-gapped government networks.
There are different streaming services with different behavior.
Google stadia had special builds, very well could have been DRM-free.
Other streaming services like G-force now are closer to renting a virtual machine with some automation scripts on top. Where after connecting you use a slightly modified version of steam to install games (which publishers allowed to be streamed) almost like you would install them locally. Those definitely aren't DRM-free (except a portion of indie titles which are DRM free everywhere). While G-force now tries to limit access to underlying OS, surface is too large to trust the platform with DRM free builds especially if it allows installing multiple games and steam workshop mods. It's a bit more complicated as g-force now also has "ready to play" games which provide more stadia like experience with better integration.
So overall it means 2 cases:
* special builds/game specific integration scripts from streaming platform -> requires extra work and agreement between streaming platform and developer/publisher, introduces uncertainty of how streaming platform limits account sharing (compared to the DRM publisher uses)
* no extra work, just single checkbox in steam developer panel -> potential conflicts with finger printing, DRM and anticheat systems
Neither of 2 are no brainer free money. Either it's extra work and bureaucracy to negotiate, prepare and configure special build. Or it's conflicting with DRM systems.
It's trivial only for smaller indie devs who are uploading DRM free builds to steam anyway.
They weren't getting money from nvidia, and really why should they? nvidia provides very expensive hardware on which I can access my own steam library, etc.
The world of IP isn't just about selling someone something, it's about reselling the same person that thing many times over. So now I have my VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, digital streaming, 4K digital streaming, 4K digital streaming HD collectors edition, etc. variants.
And of course if there are multiple cloud gaming providers, they see it as an opportunity to extort each of them.
When GFN first came out it had all of the Civilization games -- and it worked great -- but then as other cloud gaming options appeared 2K pulled the whole catalog, presumably with hand out. When Civ VII came out they suddenly allowed it all again, not only to rekindle interest in the series and presumably because some people were only going to buy the game if they could play it on the platform.
>> Why would companies withdraw licensing agreements? They get money from Nvidia
Lawyer reasons: Because they have lost the rights themselves. They may have licensed things like artwork/music for sale during a fixed period and so perpetual licenses, continual resales, would require renewing those licenses. Just look at the recent re-release of Mike Tyson's Punch Out, which had to remove Mike Tyson.
Evil reasons: They want to publish a new version of a game, say SimCity 11. The target audience is largely people already playing SimCity 10. So they discontinue SimCity 10, turn it off, to "encourage" the customer base to forget SimCity 10 and "purchase" SimCity 11.
Petty rich guy personal reasons: Say you are George Lucas and you have published something embarrassingly awful, like a Star Wars Christmas Special. The die-hard fans love it, or at least want to see it. But you are embarrassed. So you discontinue any concept of streaming/rental/sales to hide your shame, regardless of profit motivations. Also, Han shot first!
Some independent developers have stated they don't like that the experience is degraded on GeForce now (because of latency, control bugs, etc). They prefer that users are running the game in a way that they've tested themselves.
It's a bit of a grey area, and it's not true that Nvidia needs to have a licensing deal. It's definitely against the license terms you get when you purchase a game through steam to run it on arbitrary hardware, but most (at least EU) courts would probably hold that if you own a game, you can run it on any hardware you have access to.
What happened was that when Nvidia just got started, they had an opt-out framework (for developers) instead of opt-in. At the time, some game developers felt like Nvidia was profiting off of their work unfairly, and posted publicly about it, and there was a decent-sized backlash.
However, in the meantime, other competing streaming platforms have gone with opt-out and there hasn't been much of an issue around it. I think most developers have come around to the idea that it increases game sales.
Yeah I don't understand this. It prevents me from running multiple simultaneous instances of a game, but I have Steam on a million random PCs and Macs and I've never noticed that I had to link a hardware fingerprint or approve a device or something.
[You may] use one copy of the Software for your personal, non-commercial use on a single home or portable console or computer.
...
[You agree not to] use or install the Software (or permit others to do same) on a network, for on-line use
...
Installation on a network server is strictly prohibited, and this Agreement shall not serve as a network license in any manner.
GeforceNow renting you hardware is a so called third party. Why would I, who is renting out hardware, care for the licensing terms my clients have.
Btw you are also free to violate the license agreement between you and Bethesda - in a lot of cases, national law precedes licensing agreements. And often because there is no consequence for you violating it. I.e.
I also violate Youtubes ToS by using adblock - so what?
I'm not a lawyer. But IIUC, they probably care because of issues like contributory or vicarious copyright infringement, at least in the US.
If they are providing you a service through which you infringe someone's copyright (by playing a video game in violation of its licensing agreement) in exchange for giving them money, then they are risking a lawsuit. If they knowingly enable infringement (e.g. by rolling out a gaming service that lists and can automatically install games where they know, or could easily have checked, that the terms do not allow you to install on such a service), then they probably run a higher risk than if they don't knowingly enable it (e.g. by letting you rent cloud machines with GPUs, completely blind to what you're running on them), but in both cases they run a risk.
I'm sure there's a lot of law, and case law, that sets boundaries for this, but I could easily imagine cloud gaming falling on the wrong side of the boundaries.
I don't think there is a lot of case law here as it is a rocksolid, proven, business model. I've been renting dedicated and virtual servers for more than 25 years, and never has any provider told me what software I can install or run on those servers.
In the UK at least you are looking at electricity costs that are not that far away from those prices frankly.
It is not unexpected to pay 30p/kWh, which if you have a 500W graphics card is 15p/hr to play a AAA videogame, in graphics card cost alone. This ignores you will also be thrashing your CPU, which is maybe another 125W.
This is still a premium over that, but you don't need to buy the graphics card in the first place, so it's pretty understandable.
There is only one 500W GPU and those owners are cost insensitive so we can ignore them.
A more realistic number is 400-500W total power for the whole PC including the monitor. If a typical UK gamer spends 3 hours gaming every single day (or averages that, so 20 hours a week), they will add... £150 to their energy bills.
Lets compare that with two loads of laundry & tumble drying per week on eco mode (2 * 3.5kwh * £0.30 * 52) which is £110
or using a dishwasher twice a week: £40
It is not very much. And it's not subject to random licensing bait&switch, data center input lag, doesn't require the expensive monthly internet charges for the faster fiber tiers because you're streaming video data constantly, and you also have a PC to do with as you wish.
People are right to have an instinctive, emotional revulsion to game streaming. You can run the numbers and find a rational revulsion also.
If your dishwasher costs 20 quid for a single run you have hired an actual human to wash your dishes. Same with your laundry example, those numbers are insane.
They are also irrelevant? I'm not really sure what point you're making?
I think game streaming is fine. You're still buy the games, you can still play them locally. I really don't see the issue. The Stadia model was bad, sure, but "rent out a gfx card over the network" is not something I think is worth ruffling your feathers over.
If you rent in the cloud for 24 us cent per hour it works out to £195 in year with 3hr/day gaming. An Xbox Series X costs like £650 so the extra £45 you pay for streaming from a data center means your purchased Xbox will take ~15 years to pay for itself.
Because the plan is obviously to eventually remove the ability to play on your own hardware, or to buy (license) the game at all. They want you to only be able to enjoy it by paying by the hour.
It is a step towards normalization of anti-consumer habits.
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.
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.
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!
It’s not that crazy, because the whole reason Stadia was good was that Google burned money for it. Google didn’t kill the product for no reason. Contrary to their reputation, they killed it because they didn’t see a path to profitability.
I personally don’t dunk on this rental idea as much as many folks are tempted to do. If you’re someone who owns a cheap computer or tablet and just wants to play GTA VI without buying a $600 console or $1,500 computer, it’s not such a horrible deal. South Korea has been renting time in PC Bangs for decades under a similar concept.
Going further down this tangent, I watched this video about a PC Bang recently and I thought it looked like really nice place to hang out. The only real ick I got from it was a little bit of a sense that the people who go to these spend a little too much time there.
Other than that, though, the idea that you can go and rent time to play on high end hardware from a wide selection of installed games and even order food right to your booth from the computer seemed pretty awesome.
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[ 0.18 ms ] story [ 14.2 ms ] threadThe 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.
But after 4 years you still have your own console that you can sell.
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)
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.
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.
[0]: https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/
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...)
That is already a thing in NVidia Now, why would Xbox do it differently?
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.
even though phones have 1080p resolutions, the pixel density is so high you could get away with the more minute detail that would be obvious on a 24' screen.
currently Xbox games are made to be played on regular monitors the devs are optimizing for that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 mean I would never stream a game, but still
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)
Ultimately, you end up paying for the usage somehow.
-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"
Now, this feels fine with <10ms input latency over wifi. Even in 2026 I'm skeptical about sending my input to Atlanta and back.
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
On top of that, the Steam App is a bit janky, so much so that I just hauled my gaming rig out, plugged it directly into the TV, set Steam to launch at start-up in Big Picture Mode and bam, good to go.
Can't wait for the Steam Machine though...
Also the way Steam encodes the stream is reportedly lower quality than Sunshine. This has been a thing for years.
Anyway...
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
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
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.
in this case, you're clearly not allocating a device for your sole usage for a given period of time; it's a gaming SAAS, which isn't really renting
That means most of the average Xbox user's library is not supported, and if you're paying for Game Pass you almost definitely have a physical Xbox that can stream any game you have installed for free.
This has zero value for players. Streaming can have two business models - you pay a subscription to stream games you already own outside the platform like GeForce Now, or buy on the platform and stream for free like Stadia.
Xbox is charging per hour and making players buy games they already own through Game Pass.
Correct, that is why the "to stream games you bought" qualifier exists in the title :)
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.
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.
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
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.
But later on in the generation, Sony made big price cuts and went hard putting out very good exclusive games that people bought systems for. By the end, they beat out Microsoft in sales.
Then the lead-up to the Xbox One launch was such a PR disaster which the another comment covered. The PS4 continued getting great exclusive games while Microsoft's big IPs like Halo and Gears of War more or less fell out of relevancy if not had their brand destroyed by new entries that didn't impress fans. They spent way too much time and effort trying to make the Kinect the future of Xbox in hopes of replicating Nintendo's success with the Wii, years after the novelty of motion controls stopped impressing anyone.
The unfortunate thing is they dropped the ball so hard that Sony basically stopped trying in the latest generation. Sony is pissing people off left and right but they're still winning because they have no direct competition (Nintendo has been off doing their own thing since the Wii)
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)
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.
---
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.
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.
https://www.vgchartz.com/
https://www.vgchartz.com/tools/hw_date.php?reg=Global&ending...
N64/PS1/Saturn: 146 million units sold worldwide
GC/PS2/Dreamcast/Xbox: 214
Wii/PS3/Xbox 360: 275
WiiU/Switch/PS4/Xbox One: 338
Switch 2/PS5/Xbox Series: 150
So since only the last generation has lower number of units sold, it seems to me that the market for console is either only recently declining, or the cycle is much longer and people takes more time to buy the new generation.
One aspect that springs to mind immediately looking at that timeline is the rise of mobile, it wouldn't have happened immediately at launch (around 2007) but has been a building wave that meant practically everyone has a games device in their pocket. For audiences of certain genres is all they need where they might have contributed to the overall picture of dedicated gaming devices, leaving other gamers and companies to balance the books for other genres that are left.
'Shareholder value' is another problem. Shareholders, in general, do not hold shares of companies because they want those companies to succeed, but because they expect returns from those companies. If they can get a 50% return and then have the company die in a fiery blaze, most shareholders would be perfectly fine with that so long as they were reasonably confident that they wouldn't, themselves, get burnt. So you have shareholders with no interest in the long-term similarly aligned with executives who have no interest in the long-run.
There's also probably more technical issues like discounting earnings over time. A penny earned today is generally considered significantly more valuable than a penny earned tomorrow by companies due to inflation, opportunity cost, and other such issues. So even if you think the long-term is relevant, the expected earnings cost would have to be dramatic to make it comparable to the impact of next quarter.
I'd also observe, vice versa, that after Nintendo jumped on the bandwagon of charging players to use their own internet connection that their sales started declining significantly. I don't know if it's causal; even people who chose to opt out themselves might not even really know. What I mean is that this feeling of getting nickeled and dimed is going to imperil fun in some impossible to quantify fashion, and if these various actions hit another completely unquantifiable breaking point, then you start losing players in yet another unquantifiable way - until suddenly you notice that people just don't seem to want what you're offering anymore.
One is doing physical board games others are exploring retro gaming through emulation and loving it.
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 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 purchase. Nothing at all.
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.
Must take some pretty impressive technical debt to get to that point.
well, unless you want to play some peer to peer multiplayer, then there is a sub you need to pay
Half of all Americans watch more…..
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
Just a correction: Netcafes don't have to get special licences. I'm not aware of any such licences existing anymore. They just buy however many standard retail copies or online accounts they want. Sometimes a publisher will see the marketing value and will provide some copies/licences at no charge.
Going back 15-20 years or so, Valve used to run a "Cybercafe Program" that was a large monthly expense for cybercafes, but shut it down after a while because it wasn't worth the cost of administration. Now cybercafes buy Steam accounts same as any end user. Asking any publisher for a cybercafe or "commercial exploitation" licence always invoked the response "Um - no idea?" from any department you asked, coupled with "We're afraid to suggest anything" from the legal department and "just use standard copies I suppose?" from the marketing department.
I think unfortunately Aereo TV proved the opposite.
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?
We'll be fine as long as we have an open platform to play good games from studios that haven't sold out, and without interference of anti-competitive gatekeepers, but we need to defend our right to use these open platforms - definitely the PC, and if we could find a way to align, I think we could regain ground on android/ios as well.
coming from someone who thought they'd refresh their PC in 2026 (planned this in 2024), i agree. getting priced out feels like the first step in the wrong direction.
For DRM and ban avoidance detection this means either false positives (which is bad rep) or if it's tuned to ignore those signals on specific service provider hardware makes it easier to do account sharing (and thus not buying the game).
Google stadia had special builds, very well could have been DRM-free.
Other streaming services like G-force now are closer to renting a virtual machine with some automation scripts on top. Where after connecting you use a slightly modified version of steam to install games (which publishers allowed to be streamed) almost like you would install them locally. Those definitely aren't DRM-free (except a portion of indie titles which are DRM free everywhere). While G-force now tries to limit access to underlying OS, surface is too large to trust the platform with DRM free builds especially if it allows installing multiple games and steam workshop mods. It's a bit more complicated as g-force now also has "ready to play" games which provide more stadia like experience with better integration.
So overall it means 2 cases: * special builds/game specific integration scripts from streaming platform -> requires extra work and agreement between streaming platform and developer/publisher, introduces uncertainty of how streaming platform limits account sharing (compared to the DRM publisher uses) * no extra work, just single checkbox in steam developer panel -> potential conflicts with finger printing, DRM and anticheat systems
Neither of 2 are no brainer free money. Either it's extra work and bureaucracy to negotiate, prepare and configure special build. Or it's conflicting with DRM systems.
It's trivial only for smaller indie devs who are uploading DRM free builds to steam anyway.
The world of IP isn't just about selling someone something, it's about reselling the same person that thing many times over. So now I have my VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, digital streaming, 4K digital streaming, 4K digital streaming HD collectors edition, etc. variants.
And of course if there are multiple cloud gaming providers, they see it as an opportunity to extort each of them.
When GFN first came out it had all of the Civilization games -- and it worked great -- but then as other cloud gaming options appeared 2K pulled the whole catalog, presumably with hand out. When Civ VII came out they suddenly allowed it all again, not only to rekindle interest in the series and presumably because some people were only going to buy the game if they could play it on the platform.
Lawyer reasons: Because they have lost the rights themselves. They may have licensed things like artwork/music for sale during a fixed period and so perpetual licenses, continual resales, would require renewing those licenses. Just look at the recent re-release of Mike Tyson's Punch Out, which had to remove Mike Tyson.
Evil reasons: They want to publish a new version of a game, say SimCity 11. The target audience is largely people already playing SimCity 10. So they discontinue SimCity 10, turn it off, to "encourage" the customer base to forget SimCity 10 and "purchase" SimCity 11.
Petty rich guy personal reasons: Say you are George Lucas and you have published something embarrassingly awful, like a Star Wars Christmas Special. The die-hard fans love it, or at least want to see it. But you are embarrassed. So you discontinue any concept of streaming/rental/sales to hide your shame, regardless of profit motivations. Also, Han shot first!
It's a bit of a grey area, and it's not true that Nvidia needs to have a licensing deal. It's definitely against the license terms you get when you purchase a game through steam to run it on arbitrary hardware, but most (at least EU) courts would probably hold that if you own a game, you can run it on any hardware you have access to.
What happened was that when Nvidia just got started, they had an opt-out framework (for developers) instead of opt-in. At the time, some game developers felt like Nvidia was profiting off of their work unfairly, and posted publicly about it, and there was a decent-sized backlash.
However, in the meantime, other competing streaming platforms have gone with opt-out and there hasn't been much of an issue around it. I think most developers have come around to the idea that it increases game sales.
Is it??? I don't see anything in the Steam agreement about what hardware I am using?
Here's a random example from the Skyrim EULA:
Btw you are also free to violate the license agreement between you and Bethesda - in a lot of cases, national law precedes licensing agreements. And often because there is no consequence for you violating it. I.e.
I also violate Youtubes ToS by using adblock - so what?
If they are providing you a service through which you infringe someone's copyright (by playing a video game in violation of its licensing agreement) in exchange for giving them money, then they are risking a lawsuit. If they knowingly enable infringement (e.g. by rolling out a gaming service that lists and can automatically install games where they know, or could easily have checked, that the terms do not allow you to install on such a service), then they probably run a higher risk than if they don't knowingly enable it (e.g. by letting you rent cloud machines with GPUs, completely blind to what you're running on them), but in both cases they run a risk.
I'm sure there's a lot of law, and case law, that sets boundaries for this, but I could easily imagine cloud gaming falling on the wrong side of the boundaries.
Is this even legally enforceable? Technically I'd be in violation if I was playing the same copy of Skyrim on both my PC and my Steam Deck.
IANAL, but if it was ever tried, surely the clause would be struck down as invalid?
Cloud gaming is too small to be relevant in any way. That’s why it’s ignored.
To imply it being somewhat controversial, so people jump in and generate clicks.
It is not unexpected to pay 30p/kWh, which if you have a 500W graphics card is 15p/hr to play a AAA videogame, in graphics card cost alone. This ignores you will also be thrashing your CPU, which is maybe another 125W.
This is still a premium over that, but you don't need to buy the graphics card in the first place, so it's pretty understandable.
A more realistic number is 400-500W total power for the whole PC including the monitor. If a typical UK gamer spends 3 hours gaming every single day (or averages that, so 20 hours a week), they will add... £150 to their energy bills.
Lets compare that with two loads of laundry & tumble drying per week on eco mode (2 * 3.5kwh * £0.30 * 52) which is £110
or using a dishwasher twice a week: £40
It is not very much. And it's not subject to random licensing bait&switch, data center input lag, doesn't require the expensive monthly internet charges for the faster fiber tiers because you're streaming video data constantly, and you also have a PC to do with as you wish.
People are right to have an instinctive, emotional revulsion to game streaming. You can run the numbers and find a rational revulsion also.
They are also irrelevant? I'm not really sure what point you're making?
I think game streaming is fine. You're still buy the games, you can still play them locally. I really don't see the issue. The Stadia model was bad, sure, but "rent out a gfx card over the network" is not something I think is worth ruffling your feathers over.
That's the electricity cost for 1 year of operation.
It is a step towards normalization of anti-consumer habits.
Right. Microsoft's handheld is just shy over $1000.
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/...
It's crazy that after all this time, there still isn't anything that is better than it.
I personally don’t dunk on this rental idea as much as many folks are tempted to do. If you’re someone who owns a cheap computer or tablet and just wants to play GTA VI without buying a $600 console or $1,500 computer, it’s not such a horrible deal. South Korea has been renting time in PC Bangs for decades under a similar concept.
Going further down this tangent, I watched this video about a PC Bang recently and I thought it looked like really nice place to hang out. The only real ick I got from it was a little bit of a sense that the people who go to these spend a little too much time there.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=-H78SEwR5B4
Other than that, though, the idea that you can go and rent time to play on high end hardware from a wide selection of installed games and even order food right to your booth from the computer seemed pretty awesome.
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