Xbox wants you to pay 24 to 40 cents per hour to stream games you bought
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
They want to eliminate that. AIs will open source their games otherwise.
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.
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).
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.
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 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.
LLMs are created through mass ingestion of data, and so, by definition, cannot be a clean room. They are trained on the things that they're tasked with copying.
A clean-room implementation is going to be much, much more effort than a "decompilation". Even a decompilation is, I think, more than the hype is claiming. You can't just point at a game, say "decompile it and make it work on Windows" and get a result in one shot. It will take playtesting, cycling around, QA, and time to polish it up. But that will still itself be much easier than an actual clean room implementation. Let alone getting sued by the owner anyhow and having to prove it was clean room in a typical chaotic individual dev environment.
I'm afraid, the companies in question, have been more than happy to ingest pirated material.
And the forefront models have intentionally been trained on quite a bit of reverse-engineering.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_video_games...
Because they're trying to push a specific narrative.
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.
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.
It turns out that the customer's perception of a product is pretty vital to its performance in the marketplace. The math can math just fine, but if the customer doesn't feel good about it, you don't make the sale.
Subscriptions try to soften the blow of a big purchase by lowering the monthly payments under your "casual expenditures" threshold. Upfront payments reward you with an immediate sense of ownership, and no recurring anxiety about affording the item.
Combining the two in this particular order is sort of the worst of both worlds - there's a reason car loans are always low monthly payments to start, with a balloon payment at the end, when you are maximally invested...
What (where?) in the world are you even talking about?
Balloon payment loans are very rare in the United States. I don't know where you live but I don't think you realize how unusual balloon payment loans are.
One of the silver linings of a subscription model is that you're able to stop paying and move when it's no longer interesting, here you're asked to invest in a platform that can be taken from you.
Are they really? You will "own" digital licenses to the games, but you will not have any way to play them once you stop paying for the subscription.
That doesn't feel like "ownership" to me...
You often cannot run even single player games without having connected to Steam (no need for account to be locked for this, but requires connectivity for one).
Multiplayer games almost always require Steam these days.
I used Steam as an example but applies to other platforms as well.
So yeah, I would say you pay for the license only, and you do not own the games at all, not anymore, and this has been true for a long time now.
They're not yours. Can you resell and recoup? Nope, digital licenses.
Can you buy a 2k computer and play them? You can't or won't, that's the whole reason you're using this system instead.
So you effectively have 60 bucks per game as a moat to hold you in while they boil the water.
(I wound up building a gaming PC, much more capable but much more than the cost of streaming over an equivalent lifetime - IF streaming services don't enshittify to cost more and deliver less over time, which we all know they will.)
> Feels bad to buy an expensive piece of hardware, a $60+ game, and then be asked to pony up another hourly fee
That's why people were confused. You made it sound like you couldn't use your hardware to play games. Why are you streaming from cloud PCs in the first place if you have the hardware?
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)
So shocking in hindsight how ms never realized this formula as it was happening and let it wither on the vine.
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.
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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/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.
--
EDIT: And I had a chuckle seeing a topic just posted: "Disney Raising Prices Days After Confirming Ads Will Now Show Up on Every Tier" [1]
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.
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 from the cloud 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 purchased. 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.
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 ongoing subscriptions, 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:
[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.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.
I feel GTA 6 will be the last mainline GTA that we run on our local systems.
Fully homomorphic encrypted processing may also become a norm and if that is combined with some games going back to being console only, there could be significant enough protection for games that contain trade secrets. That said, the days may be numbered for trade secrets at all given that better models may make today's clever trade secrets look juvenile.
At the same time, a lot of these games were already getting decompiled and inspected at runtime. That has historically been one part of the incentive to release games on console only or console first, particularly first party titles.
In any market where it's relevant to their business interests, they can still rely on the copyright laws and can set traps for any companies using decompiled code as part of their own paid and sold product. That whole process will become cheaper and easier to do as well, plus new approaches to slowing down or hindering the results of decompilation will become normal for games in mathematically provable ways. We've already seen approaches over the years like Denuvo.
Always online games themselves have benefited from some of their code being in the cloud and that will obviously be under fire more than ever with people writing their own servers, but even that might have novel approaches that can survive advanced tampering.
But also AI can just recreate games from gameplay videos.
They can't simply copy your game and reship it, because that would be against the copyright laws in most places where these companies make their profits from. Making something sufficiently new would be technically legal, but it would also take massive computing resources even with LLMs. That's either local compute time or cloud spend.
I think the bigger risk is just brand new games being generated of all kinds rather than the more expensive and legally risky full decompilations. Mass generation could start saturating the market and soaking attention. The low end indie market is already pretty saturated and in the end games have to be appealing, review sufficiently well and find an audience. Plenty of good games have barely sold any copies.
So almost a bigger question will be, how will AI impact the marketing industry?
What actually limits someone from doing this?
1) You need the hardware to play the games, still. You still need a good enough PC or a console like a PS5 to play all these emulated/cross-compiled games. Though, the cost is moderate these days: a used PS5 goes for $400-500?
2) You need to want to jailbreak your console, giving up "mainstream" features (multiplayer, warranty). This requires some interest and know-how, too. Though the jailbreak steps are easy these days.
3) If you lack a console, your PC needs to be strong enough to play WASM or emulated/cross-compiled games. I suppose for consoles like the Switch, that aren't super powerful, most PCs made the past few years could play a AAA Zelda game in the browser. But playing on PC is often not as fun as on a console, with the couch and controller and all.
I have a hard time people en masse want to give up multiplayer, by jailbreaking their consoles.
But single-player games are probably going to have a harder time.
The video game world is already super top heavy, with mass-market multi-player games (like Valorant), not to mention casino-like gacha games. So the trends may further favor this current track.
Someone started it, lots of other bored people, followed. Damage done, remedy already in store for gamers.
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.
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...)
This is from 2019: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/11/stadia-launch-dev-the...
That is already a thing in NVidia Now, why would Xbox do it differently?
Or for long.
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.
Well… yeah. Or you can assemble it yourself for free if you prefer.
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)
In most cities it's developers who are pushing councils/government to rezone land so they can secure additional development sites.
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.
So Ireland made it almost literally illegal to build anything and it sounds like that led to bad behavior? Yes Ireland should fix corruption around building but they should also allow people to build homes.
[1]. https://www.centreforcities.org/reader/a-zoning-system-for-e...
The whois marks everything to private
Then you can follow things and you can see they receive 1.10m in donations https://register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk/en/ch...
And there you can see this guy as the charity chairman
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/may/14/nigel-hugil...
And so he is a house developer? Already sounds a bit of conflict of interest. But then let's check who is the company listed
And Gatsby Is listed as a main source of income for both company and charity parts
Which is a charity by the Sainsbury family https://register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk/en/ab...
I will dig this when I have time but this centreforcities is not an unbiased source of information
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.
/s/cloud/rentseekers/
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.
But after 4 years you still have your own console that you can sell.
-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"
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/...
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.
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
All the other games I play are 20+ years old and I play in a windows VM.
"XBOX Game Pass Ultimate" gives you fifteen hours per month of "cloud playtime" for 23 USD per month. "XBOX Game Pass Essential" gives you five hours per month for 10 USD per month. [0][1] You are currently unable to buy more hours (or play for "free" by watching adverts!) unless you are an "XBOX Insider"... [2][5] but, let's assume that what's in the AT article is what "XBOX Insiders" are paying.
So, uh, this seems like -as the kids say- dogwater for "your average gamer who games 10-12 hours a week". Unless I've fucked up my math, for your forty hours of play time, you're paying between 22 USD (with an "Essential) subscription and 31 USD (with an "Ultimate" subscription) per month.
You're paying 260->370 USD per year for the ability to stream the games. If you buy your consoles used, [3] you're paying enough to buy one or two mid-end XBOXes or ~three low-end XBOXes every year. [3] If we go back to new prices in that distant year of 2025, [4] you're still buying an entire XBOX every year just for the privilege of being able to play video games for a handful of hours on Saturdays and Sundays.
Like the kids say... that's cheeks, bro.
[0] <https://www.xbox.com/en-US/xbox-game-pass/compare>
[1] <https://www.xbox.com/en-US/cloud-gaming#join>
[2] <https://support.xbox.com/en-US/help/games-apps/cloud-gaming/...>
[3] <https://www.gamestop.com/consoles-hardware/xbox-one/consoles>
[4] <https://web.archive.org/web/20250118085114/https://www.neweg...>
[5] Given that that "free" tier exists, no points shall be awarded to those who are able to predict what XBOX "cloud playtime" pricing trends are gonna look like over the next year or so... it's like dynamiting fish in a barrel.
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 got into Xbox and Game Pass a few years ago to catch up on titles like Halo , Gears, Forza Horizon etc that I never had a chance to play. I still can’t believe that I can play thousands of games going back 20+ years.
it’s Willy Wonka’s Game Factory and people are still moaning!
It's crazy that after all this time, there still isn't anything that is better than it.
You can link most Bluetooth controllers to your fire TV stick, or chrome browser and stream games.
Hogwarts Legacy is included in standard Amazon Prime and worth playing if you want some casual fantasy open world gaming.
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.
What does this have to do with this? I'm not sure you understand the point being made..
>What does this have to do with this? I'm not sure you understand the point being made..
Chris, buddy. We probably should not talk on this platform again. Have a great day!
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.
I've had better luck finding great games I didn't know about from the 1990s than from the past twenty years.
If you like 2d platforming exploration types, try Hollowknight, Celeste, VVVVVV, Ori, Animal Well. Each one is fantastic.
So far, only Rusted Moss and Silksong were worth my time among the platformers I tried, which included the original Hollow Knight (platforming is too easy), Celeste (too easy A-sides, unfun B-sides) and Animal Well (too easy base game, too cryptic post game).
I'll have to give Rusted Moss a try. Silksong is kicking my ass right now.
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.
Play old games, emulate, or better yet, take a walk or read books. The industry hates you and wants to waste all of your money.
They have failed at that service business several times over decades, and continue re-discovering customers don't like the sales model.
Someone has to pay for the over-provisioned data-center boondoggle, but note classic board games and cards are still fun. =3
Ultimately, you end up paying for the usage somehow.
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.
MS is charging you 24 to 40 cent to rent a GPU so you can play without having to buy hardware, they aren't charging you to play your game on your own hardware.
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.
It also doesn't really matter if they have kernel stuff or not, unless you game on a different user a user space process can already read all your files and even memory of your processes.
That's not a thing on the default config of any mainstream distro I'm aware of; everyone restricts attaching a debugger and similar to root by default these days.
But AC is kinda useless on Linux anyway, might as well have none.
Previously https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/10/epic-games-launcher-pr...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50088762
The entire point is to lock down a user's linux install so that they can't interfere with the anticheat.
The computers are ours. We are the gods of our digital realms. Their software is running under our control. This "take it or leave it" nonsense doesn't really fly. Adversarial interoperability means there's any number of options available to us.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera...
The notion that people would willingly give up this godlike power just to play online video games without cheaters is one of the saddest ideas I've ever come across. Gamers would reduce our personal computers to consoles without a shred of guilt. I barely have words to express how I feel about that.
Not a problem. It's their computer, they can edit the game's memory to freeze their character's hitpoints or look through walls if they really want to. As the owners of the machine, it's their god given right.
> People are breaking the social contract of competitive games.
This is not even remotely close to being worth sacrificing our freedom and leverage over. Let it happen. Play with friends you know and trust instead of internet randoms.
> Booting into a special environment just for competitive games would allow both to coexist.
There will never be such a "special environment" for games. Every government and corporation under the sun wants this for much more sinister reasons. The notion that this will be limited to video games is laughable. Video game are merely how they are selling this subversion to you.
Either your computer is yours or it's not. And if your computer allows strangers to set up an untouchable embassy within your system where they can do anything they want and remain forever beyond your reach, then it's not really your computer, is it? It's the corporation's computer, they're just generously allowing you to use it... Provided you follow their silly policies and rules.
The abuses that will materialize if we allow them to get away with this nonsense will put science fiction to shame.
This is happening irregardless of what your wants are. Booting into a self contained game image allows both to co exist, rather than Epic and such locking down normal distros.
Coexist? That's total nonsense. This is merely a temporary solution for them. The end game is the total destruction of computing freedom as we know it today. Video games are just the first thing they will take away from you. They also want your encryption, your local AIs, your torrents, your adblockers, your emulators, anything and everything that harms their bottom line and subverts their laws in any way.
Soon you will no longer be allowed to boot into anything that will give you any form of control. It's the war on general purpose computing, cheating in online games is completely irrelevant next to that. The democratization of cryptography allows citizens to defeat police, judges, even literal spies. Computers are too subversive to allow us citizens to own them, they think we should only have computers that run a restricted set of government signed executables. It's the end of everything the word "hacker" ever stood for.
What makes it especially hilarious in a sad way is the fact that this is what makes personal computers truly special. Consoles are just locked down computers, we're the ones who have freedom. Considerable effort is spent on jailbreaking consoles precisely to restore that freedom. Yet the PC gamers seem to be almost eager to "coexist" with these hostile corporations whose entire mission is to reduce our computers to appliances.
If you want to see what happens when you compromise on this, all you have to do is look at mobile operating systems. They're all owned by corporations and governments, and it's enforced by hardware remote attestation. Install a custom system where you're in control? Attestation fails. You're banned from everything, you get no service anywhere, you are ostracized from digital society, you become a second class citizen. Mark my words: one day we will need remote attestation just to connect to the internet.
Not everyone plays online games, but most people need communications apps, banking apps, government apps. Our "free distros" will be nothing but paperweights soon if we don't find a way literally outlaw remote attestation. I think people are really underestimating what's truly at stake here.
I say this as someone who plays games that are significantly aided by remote-attestation-based anticheat: it's a beachhead that we will regret ceding.
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.
If you want true freedom, you should follow Richard Stallman.
There is a problem though: he talks about software freedom, not computer freedom.
Right now we can make free software ourselves and enjoy the freedom that brings, but the war on general purpose computing rages on and it threatens to invalidate all of our efforts. Free software is completely pointless if our computers start refusing to run it.
We need to enshrine computer freedom into law and literally ban stuff like remote attestation. We also need distributed computer manufacturing technology so that normal people can simply create their own free computers at home just like they can create free software at home.
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.
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.
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.
That entire paragraph makes it obvious that I'm talking about hardware. From the first sentence that spells it out, to talking about upgrading RAM. On the software front, the "open" PC ecosystem is heading in a bad direction for consumers too. So what if I can install from any store if they all rent me the same game at the same price? The difference between Valve and Epic is that one has a loyal following of promoters but in the end I don't own the game, I'm only renting it. And we're always one step away from rentseeking and or losing access even to those rentals.
Reminds me of the enshittttification of TV where every new system starts off ad free and then adds ads anyways.
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.
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 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.
How often do you buy new computers? I paid something like 2500 USD for my Threadripper machine (including 128 GB of RAM and graphics card) ~seven years ago. Between now and then I paid ~580 USD (at the end of last year) to get a new graphics card and that's it. After last year's upgrade, I've yet to run into a game that it doesn't play reasonably, and I've also gotten a lot of work done with it over all the years I've had it.
The console lifecycles being like a decade long has been a fantastic blessing for us PC gamers. Most AAA games are intended to run well on those ancient almost-PCs, which means that our old actually-PCs usually play the games just fine.
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.
The nickle and dime tax.
Uh yeah if you buy the Xbox, you don't need to pay to play it
I mean I would never stream a game, but still
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.
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.
Anyway...