Streaming games from your own Xbox is free. This service is for people who don't have that "expensive piece of hardware".
Right, but those people also don't own Xbox games. So this goes from "add-on fee to play the games your already own conveniently", to "buy a $60 game and then pay $/hour to actually play it"
Are you saving money in the second scenario vs buying a console? Almost certainly. But it doesn't feel that way to the person paying a big whack upfront and then also stacks of game time.
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...
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.
What (where?) in the world are you even talking about?
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?