im just wondering what everyone is doing about the cloud on xbox planning on trying to limit gaming hours per month and how people plan to get round it
It's probably gotten to the point now where you may as well completely ditch Gamepass and spend a similar amount of money on a GFN subscription. 6 hours of vastly superior stream quality every day.....and you can buy your games from the considerably cheaper Steam platform. The bonus of that being, you can compile a library of PC games to play today and have them readily available should you ever move from XBOX to PC (including Steam Deck & Steam Machine). Kinda cool really because I played the PC version of ATS/ETS2 on my XBOX 3 years ago...and they were waiting for me when I bought my Steam Deck in 2025.
This game we get for free and the cloud want to charge us to play it i think thats wrong so yeah LOVE the cloud if only we could get this on disk
The limits are for cloud gaming (playing on an xbox hosted by Microsoft, e.g. from an iPad or Android tablet), not if you are playing on your own Xbox.
Nope, the limits are for cloud gaming across ALL gamepass subscriptions...with the free tier (for non-subscribers) remaining at 60 mins per day with ads. They sent out an XBOX message to all subscribers this week explaining the November changes. https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2026/09/03/xbox-cloud-gaming-changes/ *note: These figures are MONTHLY limits
Yup, that's the way to do it....but gen8 gamers who (on the advise of Microsoft) bought gen9 games to play via the cloud are getting proper screwed over with these new rules. "Pay £16.99 to play for 30 mins a day - but fear not when your measly allowance runs out...you can purchase more time to play longer!!". It's just pure greed.
One thing it's worth pointing out, on the cloud, all of your DLC is already pre loaded, you don't have to download or redownload any of it. I do get the "cloud hate" it's a bit like the physical / digital argument, but for games like TSW and FS, it's a no brainer, FS actually performs better over cloud than it does locally.
It a totally different discussion then the physical/digital one, but to stay on topic, I will not go further on this. I don't agree with your no brainer, it's a fact that all those subscription service become more expensive over time with less service. They start with (to) low prices to encourage or convince people to switch over, when there are enough people switched over, the prices will rise and by then it's hard or to late to escape the service. Look at Microsoft 365 for example, compared to a stand alone Office version. Also playing TSW or FS with game pass is a bad idea. You're paying to much every month to play a game, which you can also buy pretty cheap. Now TSW5 is off game pass, while you where able to buy the base game for 9 euro or so. Playing games on game pass is only interesting for games you finish in one month, not for playing games long term. I played games like TSW, Farming Simulator, Snowrunner and Transport Fever for months or even years, which would become very expensive when I played it on game pass. Sometimes I have game pass for a month to play a certain game and that's it. So in conclusion, relying on those subscriptions for games like TSW and FS is only a no brainer when you have no brain or when you only want to try them for a month, in other cases you just pay way to much. And now, with only getting a limited amount of hours for cloud gaming included, it will even become more expensive. Hardware nowadays isn't cheap too, but EUR 21,- a month for game pass is already EUR 252,- a year and then you're only allowed to play 15 hours from the cloud at this moment.
All due respect, anyone who looked up the economics of Game Pass would've realized what Microsoft are doing is unsustainable. Their own projections for profitability needed at least 100 million users sub to it, back when it was announced I thought that number was ridiculous, I'm frankly shocked no one at MS seemed to ever realize how stupid that was. They were thinking they could maybe get that by 2030 with aggressive pricing, but they've topped out around 30 million with no real path toward making it profitable. This is why there's been all these changes in strategy lately, they gambled hard on it working, and it hasn't. In fact lot of devs at MS seem to believe the subscription model is why games like the latest Doom under-performed.
I understand that, was clarifying for those that perhaps didn't understand - if you download and install games to your own Xbox this is not affected. This is limits for launching a game from the store without installing, which runs on an Xbox in a Microsoft data centre somewhere and streams to your local device, be it a PC, mobile/tablet or even an Xbox.
The economics of cloud gaming were based on companies like Microsoft being able to get notably cheaper access to hardware at scale than the general public, and thus being able to present a rental option at a low price. Trouble is, thanks to the current bubble, wherein Microsoft can thank itself in part for the footbullet there, all the big gaming hardware vendors are now being given "take it or leave it and also go LOVE yourself either way" offers on extortionately priced memory by the RAM cartel, even for their cloud servers, suddenly pricing them out of financial viability on the thing they'd been betting their future on.
"The Cloud" is still just a fancy word for someone else's computer. Do not rely on it or sooner or later you run into issues, such as mentioned above no matter how convenient it seems now.
Nothing dependent on a supply which can be interrupted is ever truly "convenient". Hell, I have a 3kWh battery backup for power outages too.
