gaming by the hour
Xbox wants you to pay 24 to 40 cents per hour to stream games you already bought
Time-based a la carte charges come on top of the purchase price for the games themselves.
Credit:
Microsoft
Credit:
Microsoft
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.” Today, Microsoft rolled out those a la carte Cloud Playtime purchases to Xbox Insiders, with prices that might be a bit galling for players who have already purchased these streamable games.
The “introductory launch pricing” for Xbox’s Cloud Playtime purchases is as follows:
- 10 hours for $4 (~$0.40/hour)
- 25 hours for $8 (~$0.32/hour)
- 50 hours for $12 (~$0.24/hour)
Purchased playtime “remains available until it’s used,” Microsoft writes, so you don’t have to worry about your 50-hour purchase expiring before you can use it fully.
Paying for playtime directly like this evokes images of old arcades, where players would invest a quarter or two (in 20th century dollars) often for just a few minutes of gameplay. That kind of metered play has fallen heavily out of fashion, though, in favor of one-time purchases for an all-you-can-play experience at home.
On the surface, paying as low as 24 cents for an hour of streaming game time doesn’t sound completely unreasonable. Remember, though, that these streaming costs come on top of whatever you paid to buy the game in the first place. Unlike an Xbox Game Pass subscription—which includes a few hours of monthly streaming access to hundreds of games as part of the subscription price—these Cloud Playtime packs “require cloud playable game purchase or, for select games, free-to-play access,” Microsoft writes.
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.
Getty Images
Credit:
Getty Images
Keep the meter running
Microsoft’s metered Cloud Playtime packs differ from Google’s failed Stadia streaming experiment, which offered unlimited streaming playtime across devices for games you purchased on the platform. Of course, Stadia game purchases also didn’t let you download games for local play on a PC or console, making the overall value proposition quite different. That was especially true after Stadia’s 2022 shutdown made those purchases unplayable (though Google offered full refunds for any and all Stadia purchases at that point).
In 2014, Sony offered a la carte streaming game access for set rental periods as part of its new PlayStation Now service. While that system didn’t require up-front game purchases, the initial pricing was exorbitant, rising to $30 for 90 days of real-time streaming access, even for games that could be purchased outright on disc for less.
Those early streaming price experiments quickly gave way to an all-you-can-stream PlayStation Now subscription plan, which has now morphed into unlimited streaming of select PlayStation games through the top-tier, $20/month (or $160/year) PlayStation Plus Premium plan.
Microsoft is also reminding cloud-curious gamers that Xbox Insiders can test free, ad-supported streams of games they own without buying any playtime packs. That might be the best option for gamers who want to test out a quick Halo session on their phone, rather than maintaining regular streaming access to their Xbox libraries. But Microsoft also says that paid users will get “shorter wait times [and] high-quality streaming,” meaning a deteriorated experience for those who use the ad-supported tier.
In the end, it’s a question of how much of a mass market there is for Xbox Cloud Streaming on its own, rather than as an outgrowth of Xbox Game Pass subscriptions. Last month, Microsoft said that only 4 percent of Game Pass subscribers would be affected by the subscription’s new limits of five to 15 hours of streaming playtime per month.
That suggests only a small minority of Xbox users want to use cloud streaming for a significant portion of their gaming time, even when it was included as a free perk with their existing subscription. How much less interest will there be among non-subscribers who have to pay by the hour for streaming access to games they already own?
