Xbox limits cloud gaming for Game Pass subscribers to 15 hours a month

Xbox is putting a monthly clock on cloud gaming for Game Pass subscribers. From November, customers on the £16.99 Ultimate plan will be able to stream games for 15 hours a month before buying more time.

The other subscription tiers will have lower limits. Premium users will receive 10 hours, while Essential users will receive five. Xbox said the restrictions reflect the rising cost of cloud gaming and will help it continue investing in the service’s reliability and performance.

“

This is a pretty awful change, hopefully Xbox adds an extra zero on the end cause 15hrs is abysmal. 30 minutes a day, really?

Cloud gaming lets players stream games from remote servers to a phone, tablet or controller instead of downloading and running them on a home PC or console. Xbox said only 4% of Game Pass users use the service. A recent Wall Street Journal report put the total number of Game Pass subscribers at 30 million, which would mean about 1.2 million users could be affected.

“

absolutely nothing is safe from the AI-driven component crisis

The limits drew criticism from some subscribers. One commenter on X wrote, “This is a pretty awful change, hopefully Xbox adds an extra zero on the end cause 15hrs is abysmal. 30 minutes a day, really?”

Jez Corden of Windows Central said the move showed that “absolutely nothing is safe from the AI-driven component crisis,” while also revealing Microsoft’s priorities. He said cloud gaming and artificial intelligence rely on the same data-centre infrastructure, adding that offering unlimited free access to Microsoft Copilot while restricting paid cloud gaming appeared contradictory.

“

start to innovate on affordability and efficiency

Xbox said users would also be able to access cloud gaming without Game Pass by buying cloud playtime hours through the Xbox store. It has not said how much the extra time will cost. The announcement followed comments from Xbox chief executive Asha Sharma, who said the industry needed to innovate on affordability and efficiency amid a crisis in computing prices. She described the period as “Rampocalypse”, referring to the surge in the price of random-access memory as data centres expand.

“

Rampocalypse