alt Hacker NewsIf 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.
There is no bait-and-switch, but this is going to change things.
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.