Feels bad to buy an expensive piece of hardware, a $60+ game, and then be asked to pony up another hourly fee to play it on your tablet.
Of course, free game streaming was never a viable business model, so this isn't unexpected, but people aren't going to love the change either way.
This 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.
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.
---
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.
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?