If you buy the expensive piece of hardware and the game, you can play it on your tablet for free. With Remote Play! You've always been able to do that. Nothing changes.

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.

>but people aren't going to love the change either way.

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.

Streaming games from your own Xbox is free. This service is for people who don't have that "expensive piece of hardware".

That is not quite accurate -- the Game Pass library was a subset of what could be streamed -- things that were not available in Game Pass could still be streamed provided you owned them. When games went out of Game Pass you could purchase them and continue streaming.