Why do they keep stressing the "games you already bought!!!" part? There is no charge to play the game on your own hardware. This pricing is for renting the GPUs, same as GeForce Now and plenty of other services. And it's a pretty solid deal for people who don't want to build a multi-thousand dollar rig for gaming 10-20 hours a week.
Because the model is diverged from the existing model Microsoft established via Game Pass, which made game streaming part of the licensing, not an add-on to purchasing.
Feels bad to buy an expensive piece of hardware, a $60+ game, and then be asked to pony up another hourly fee to play it on your tablet.
Of course, free game streaming was never a viable business model, so this isn't unexpected, but people aren't going to love the change either way.
>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.
Microsoft remembers that just a few short decades ago you'd pay a coin that was usually worth more than today's quarter to play at the arcade and got far less than an hour for it. You owned nothing and were happy for it.
A lot of big tech companies want to bring back those time because they believe the few decades in between where people owned and controlled their devices and software in a very open computing ecosystem were a mistake. So the aim now is to give you a device you pay for and use but never fully control, and software or media that you rent but never own.
> People are in stockholm syndrome over it though and aren't going to leave.
People usually dont - until the levies break, and they do. The PlayStation 4 won its generation, because people left XBox for it, in part, over game sharing (or lack thereof)
It feels like PS4 winning was more a result of the halo 3 world of all chat staying in lobbies xbox live dying than anything else. PS3 outsold xbox outside North america too so its really only a regional phenomenon. Hard to really articulate what a social phenomenon halo 3 was in its time. We all just assumed every new game would be like this going forward, but there was never a game like it since. Communities too fractured into different nonexclusive IPs. Death of allchat and staying in lobbies and no one bothering with the mic anymore. No more interest in offering stuff like custom game tools or mapmakers like forge. No fileshare like what bungie.net had for clips and maps.
So shocking in hindsight how ms never realized this formula as it was happening and let it wither on the vine.
Basically everything Microsoft (deservedly) got shit for with the Xbox One, and which their reputation never recovered from, is bog-standard practice on consoles and plenty of games now.
I can't even remember what MS did or didn't do in that keynote. Are they really hurting in this gen? I think their success vs PS is all about (lack of) good platform exclusives along with how online gaming got more siloed and less communal. Halo 3 won them the north american market and it wouldn't have been the same without all chat and everyone still having a working mic at that point in the 360s life.
Xbox One was originally going to require frequent online check ins, I think daily or weekly, games on disc were going to tie themselves to your account and publishers could choose whether or not you could resell them at select retailers or share them with your friends, IIRC you could share a game one time with a friend. They also didn't focus on games when showing it off and it was priced $100 higher than PS4 despite being weaker because of the bundled Kinect nobody wanted.
They are not doing super amazing this gen. Reports have them selling 1/3rd the units of PlayStation 5, Game Pass has stalled, they apparently used a JIT manufacturing setup and so were much more affected by the component shortage, so a console that was $500 at launch is now $800.
Funnily enough, because they put in serials into Xbox One games for tracking they did recently launch a really cool disc to digital service that gives the best benefits of physical and digital.
People are happy enough to spend their money on it though. (Personally I'm amazed people pay money for some different coloured pixels in a game, but in general I don't really like modern games. I aged out somewhere around the PS2 era and now mostly buy from gog.com or play emulators: I'm not the target market!).
Yeah I don't understand the skins/cosmetics stuff at all, just seems lost on me and gamers of my generation. Always shocking to me when I see gamers online complain about say the lack of compelling cosmetic offerings in the in game store, as if that's a big selling point of the game for them. I always use default skins. Earned skins are another story, I'll use those because they mean something. Purchased skins though is almost like stolen valor.
> 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.
There's no need to overcomplicate it with "feelings", the math is fairly straightforward. The cost of games is the same in either case. Beyond that you either pay $800-$1000 for a console/$2000+ for a gaming PC, OR $10-20/mo for cloud gaming. Depending on your needs #2 might be the better option, which is why services like GeForce Now are so popular.
Not present in the math is that the cloud gaming service is able (and likely) to raise prices substantially, worsen the service or simply disappear.
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.
> There's no need to overcomplicate it with "feelings", the math is fairly straightforward
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...
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.
10-20 hours a week is a lot of gaming. Was it suggested that was a small amount and not worth the investment to have an actual machine? 10-20hrs over a month is more in the realm of streaming imo.
In the case of Xbox, you'd get something comparable to Xbox Series X (or S in some situations). So it's hardly comparable to a multi-thousand dollar rig.
"""Open sourcing""" (this needs maximum scare quotes) games by AI-washing the decompilation is legally just about the same as cracking. You won't be able to deploy the result on a walled garden console and most likely not for for money anywhere, and FOSS people won't touch it with a ten-foot pole.
Illegality isn't going to stop anything. It's going to happen regardless.
Fixing this requires the end of free personal computing as we know it today. Every computer must become a walled garden. Everything the word "hacker" ever stood for must be destroyed.
Sure, but illegality means it's not going to happen commercially.
And the game industry has continued to grow in spite of rampant piracy for decades, so there's not much to change here other than a slight reduction in the value of console exclusives if they can be easily vibe ported to PC (but the majority of players will play them on console anyway, as is the case with current console platforms that are easily emulated like Switch).
It is going to happen, but mostly for older games to keep them playable and maybe to get console exclusives to PC. It doesn't make sense to compete with the copied games because it's illegal. It doesn't make sense to "crack" the games like that because one can just crack the original games the usual way (probably with AI support, but that doesn't matter).
Not going to be viable for entire genres of games because latency.
AIs can't open source games, they can only assist in pirating them.
But pirates have historically done a pretty good job without AI.
Existing trends towards games with required online components, subscription-based content and microtransactions will no doubt continue, of course.
Not streaming, other than as an extra-cost option, because the margins on subscriptions and microtransactions are bound to be orders of magnitude higher while providing more value to the majority of players.
> AIs can't open source games, they can only assist in pirating them.
AIs should be able to use the same clean room reverse engineering techniques humans use in order to produce a legally clean open source game engine that can use the original game's copyrighted assets.
... A clean room, means that you aren't reverse engineering. You're producing the same result, with zero awareness of the process, or it isn't a clean room.
LLMs are created through mass ingestion of data, and so, by definition, cannot be a clean room. They are trained on the things that they're tasked with copying.
It isn't that it will have been trained on the source code. The "decompilation" craze has it in the name... it is being done by decompiling the game and then modifying it. I don't think it's even a question as to whether or not the game companies are going to come down hard on this and I would not recommend to anyone that they jump up and volunteer to be the legal test case for that.
A clean-room implementation is going to be much, much more effort than a "decompilation". Even a decompilation is, I think, more than the hype is claiming. You can't just point at a game, say "decompile it and make it work on Windows" and get a result in one shot. It will take playtesting, cycling around, QA, and time to polish it up. But that will still itself be much easier than an actual clean room implementation. Let alone getting sued by the owner anyhow and having to prove it was clean room in a typical chaotic individual dev environment.
It's not though. We get the machine code for programs we run on our PCs. All the logic is provided to the end user. The only protection these days, is not doing all the game logic on the end users PC.
You make agent A decompile the code and describe the behavior of each function in a spec. Then agent B with no access to the internet or the original code implements it.
This is legally safe because the spec only described interfaces and had no copyrighted code from the original app. APIs are fair use under Google v Oracle and code that accidentally ends up the same falls under merger doctrine.
They can maybe try and get you on patents but that's easy to avoid by doing it in Europe. Trade secrets don't apply because you reverse engineered the code. The only thing left is good old section 1201.
Of course it's different in practice because these companies have huge legal teams and know where the corpo friendly or tech illiterate judges work. But that's a separate question from is it legal or not.
Copyright infringement has always been trivial, but the same couldn't be said about reverse engineering. AIs changed that. The market fot remakes and ports is now threatened. Instead of just waiting ages for some company to port their games to PC, people can just do it themselves.
While visiting not(USA) recently, found Xbox Cloud streaming no longer viable (lag fest) though last year travels (even over 5g hotspot) it was fine. Doesn't bode well for this streaming concept.
Looked for a real console and discovered all small shops and big box chains offer Nintendo and PS, none have Xbox. Speaking with managers revealed they or their suppliers "lost" or "ended" contracts to carry it.
Secondary market / used was dirt cheap – good condition consoles for less than a new controller: €35 for Xbox One S, €85 for Xbox Series S.
Sounds fair. If you essentially already have a TV or other device as a thin client, I can see many people happily paying $12 for 50 hours compared to spending $1000 on the entire console
Yeah like the Google Stadia. I think there was news of someone who spent >100s of hours on Red Dead Redemption 2 only to have all his save data wiped when Stadia shut down.
It will be $1/hour in a year. Then you will have to pay a different rate for better graphics. These things don't end well. Once they see that they have a stable customer base, they will figure out how to squeeze even more money from their customers. Of course, it will be advertised as something that the customers themselves required and they do it for them, not for themselves.
I have a server running in my basement with 2 nvidia Tesla GPUs that I bought for ~$70 each on ebay. (Unfortunately the RAM cost an arm and a leg). I built it for inference, but I also set it up to run sunshine server and now I have my Steam library on the TV through a Raspberry Pi 3. Even better, it was a fun and interesting project, maybe not as straightforward as you think. Unfortunately it's entirely possible that it costs .24/hr just for the electricity.
Now, this feels fine with <10ms input latency over wifi. Even in 2026 I'm skeptical about sending my input to Atlanta and back.
Yes, I understand that. My point is that 2x Teslas are overkill for gaming - his power bill is so high because he's using an expensive ML inference box to stream games.
Different from others, I don't think the price is fair. But also I don't know the cost structure well enough, I can have only an educated guess.
But what I am definitely afraid of is that they will want to charge games per hour anyway.
The talks that consoles will cost 2000 USD is part of it. They don't want you to own things anymore.
You can't buy a house anymore, because they rather buy and keep it to create shortages and make you pay an absurd rent.
We should be talking more about how taxes should fit into this world where they are positioning themselves to not allow people to have things, not even the basic.
For examples, in the housing thing, it should not only have higher taxes for keeping properties empty but also it should be exponential otherwise it will become a cost to people. Making it exponential make it unviable.
Also, investment funds should be much more regulated and should require approval for every transaction above a threshold (which imo should be small to close loopholes).
This will slow things down enough.
The demand will still exist but companies will fill the gap. We should not be relying on one single investment fund to control your health, housing and employment.
We also should be discussing on closing all the gaps that ultra rich are using to not contribute back to the system they explore.
They became leeches/parasites and not putting back the amount they should is causing them to be able to break the system more and more.
The only Pacific way right now is to boy;cott these big fellas.
They got to comfortable saying that we are trash and the blame of everything is on us while doing everything they can to not even pay basic rights to employees.
I also think that if you know a trillionaire employee with a white collar, they also should get bit more pressure.
I know someone working in a company which recently caused hundreds of "collateral" deaths, and for him and everyone in the company, it is not their fault they exploded innocent people. We need to put these folks back to reality, because they are the same type of trash as we are, and they don't know it.
Now I guess it is obvious why they have been building so many bunkers lately.
They were definitely conspiring.
(Btw, I have a strong feeling that sxai+t might become an investment fund with several companies, but that's another conversation)
Who do you think is paying to keep coming that way? Businesses that have an interest in keeping it that way, for example comercial realestate companies.
Do you think commercial real estate are backing maintaining single family zoning in places like Palo Alto, or do you think they'd actually benefit from tossing all the zoning, and being able build, sell, and rent as many office buildings and apartments and condominiumns as possible?
Based on my personal observations, most of the local zoning restrictions in the US come from conservative local residents, and not a cabal of developers. The latter want to build.
And I am using the word conservative in the non-political sense here - opposed to change. The individual motivations are many, but ultimately, a lot of people tend to avoid change around where they live.
In large cities, housing is now being built specifically for rent, and there are many early sales opportunities available exclusively to companies.
In certain cities of Ireland, it is common for a new block of apartments to be sold out within the first hour. You get in a queue to visit on the first day and you don't even have a chance.
Real estate development is a pretty competitive business with few barriers to entry. Nobody controls enough of the market to make it worth trying to restrict other developers.
In most cities it's developers who are pushing councils/government to rezone land so they can secure additional development sites.
I don’t think so - those companies are atleast modestly pro growth. They want to do more projects. In NYC and Boston local residents talk about “evil developers” who want to replace vacant lots with homes and businesses
I don't know about Boston case, but in Ireland it is common for developers to build and investment funds to buy it all in closed door meetings. So your only option is to rent.
In other places of the world where I lived, it was common to rent a completely different region to only find out later the company letting the house/apartment belonged to the same group.
> Ireland’s planning and zoning framework is widely regarded by economists and housing experts as one of the most restrictive, bureaucratic, and hostile-to-development systems among developed common-law nations [1]
So Ireland made it almost literally illegal to build anything and it sounds like that led to bad behavior? Yes Ireland should fix corruption around building but they should also allow people to build homes.
Seems reasonable for your average user who games 10-12 hours a week and would not want to go through the hassle of owning and maintain a physical console (plus paying electricity on that).
When did owning a physical console become a hassle and require maintenance? I feel like I'm on crazy pills reading the comments in this thread. They can't be real.
No, there'll just be fewer big-budget games. Streaming is always going to be a sub-par experience (latency and video compression). And the mess that AI made of the hardware market has likely killed off (or at least indefinitely postponed) the next generation of games consoles
But we've got 4-5 decades of games to enjoy.
Part of the reason that the games industry is struggling is that there's been no real generational leaps for a long time. Gaming used to be driven by those technological leaps, but these days we just get incremental improvements. 10-15yr old games are just as entertaining as brand new releases and often don't look too dated.
Also, ever more people are getting into retro gaming, enjoying the classics from the 80s and 90s, from well before microtransactions and hyper-competitive online multiplayer.
Nevermind the generational leaps, there has been a lack of creativity and a flood of low quality titles that make it harder and harder to find the few good games among them.
I've had better luck finding great games I didn't know about from the 1990s than from the past twenty years.
Is this a logical conclusion or is this correlation in a time when companies in myriad industries are pushing rent over buying because margins are so much better?
Piracy has been present since the advent of the personal computer and I think it's accepted by most that some people will pay, and others just won't. I'm not sure that AI reverse engineering changes this picture.
>Is this a logical conclusion or is this correlation in a time when companies in myriad industries are pushing rent over buying because margins are so much better?
I think both, I would argue that right now, giving hardware into the hands of your customer presents a much bigger risk nowadays. Streaming is obviously the better option for margins, and now it is basically the only option to keep the product under control. Also now that consumer GPU/memory is getting more and more expensive, I think it has become realistically the only way forward.
Server GPU/memory has also been getting more expensive along with normal customer stuff. Hyperscalars with a lot of hardware do try to keep prices constant for a bit (since prices for hardware they bought is amortized), but they too are bound by economic markets and have to raise prices.
This, and the next generation of consoles being no less than 1600$/€ on day one.
Given they're moving to digital-only future I fully expect them to sell a "50$ + monthly subscription" dongle-like version of ps6 and xbox where you can play the game you buy as a streaming solution, or pay the aforementioned price for a "locally hosted" device on a console.
I can't see the next generation ever launching unless the market recovers.
And I'm not sure we're ever going to see cheap RAM or GPUs again. There's clearly more money to be made at current price levels, and not much potential for competition to fix the market.
They can certainly try but I'm not convinced that gamers are gonna latch onto the idea. Sure, a new GTA game might be able to do it to a certain level of success, but I'm not sure a Gears of War: E-Day will be able to get people to pay a constant subscription to stream it. Indie games will almost certainly not go streaming exclusive, so you'll now be competing even more fiercely with indies and older games.
Your "logical conclusion" ignores that many popular games rely on online content anyway. You still need their servers without needing it to be streamed.
Why did you have to phrase it like this, instead of just bringing up your own counterpoint?
Also, I'd see the concern here as where the code runs: if there is a dependency on the server to pull down code/assets, but it still runs it locally, then there is still an opportunity to pirate it locally - So this isn't a point about cloud-dependence, but AI/piracy specifically pushing execution to the server side.
Treating anti-consumer practices as the "logical conclusion" while failing to give one is annoying. What you stated doesn't solve the fact that many people want to play games with others online, it is not just about assets.
Can you walk us though your thought process here? Is piracy actually a problem? How is taking away ability to play offline a "logical conclusion"? Based on what evidence?
I remember when PS3 online was free but enough XBOX Cawadoody Halo 2KSports gamers were happy to pay extra for… I’m not sure what… that it was normalized and so Sony got in on that too and made the whole industry more expensive.
Reminds me of the enshittttification of TV where every new system starts off ad free and then adds ads anyways.
I bought one game and received a Chromecast Ultra and Stadia controller at no extra cost, then had the entire purchase refunded automatically years later. Great deal!
That just seems like such a strange offering. The number of supported devices is fairly low[0], and you already need to have purchased the game (well hold a license to the game). Some of the supported devices are Xboxes and some are Smart TVs, in that setup it would make more sense to have the TV use your own Xbox (assuming that they are on the same LAN).
The price seems a little high, as I expect them to be before tax and currency conversion, but mostly I struggle to see who this is for.
How is this number "fairly low"? It supports every Windows and Mac PC, iOS, Android, Xbox, Quest VR and most major TVs and TV sticks. What exactly are you gaming on?
Okay, that might have been worded wrong. I don't the device selection as being particularly supportive of more than a few limited use cases. If you're at home it would make more sense to support your Xbox streaming to your VR headset or Smart TV, you shouldn't have to go via the cloud.
If you're out, on vacation or something, then sure streaming to your phone or tablet makes sense, but you're not going to sign in to a random Smart TV or PC with your Xbox account (at least Microsoft shouldn't encourage that behaviour). That just seems like such a limited use case to me.
I don't think this is inherently unreasonable, keeping in mind that gaming cafes are (perhaps quickly becoming a were) a thing, and in those you were usually provided some set of games that the center owned or licensed, but also allowed to log in via something like Steam and play your own games. Xbox / Consoles in general were already a walled garden compared to, say, GOG, and heading towards this streaming model being the default is only a step further in the obvious direction.
Maybe things are different now but I have never seen a single gaming cafe in my life where the games were "owned or licensed". We all know how they operated.
Not my experience - this place is long closed now, but a shop near me used to offer access to steam accounts that were managed through Steam's PC Café Program.
Hey technically we all made money on stadia. Bought the Cyberpunk 2077 bundle which came with a stadia kit with controller and chromecast 4k. For around $70-80 if memory serves me correct. Played it for a while and hated that the controller was wifi for direct stadia connection and only wired if I wanted to use it for anything else on my PC/phone. Sold the controller/chromecast bundle on ebay for $90. Continued to play Cyberpunk and Destiny2 over Stadia with mouse and keyboard until the service shutdown and Google refunded me for the original purchase.
I totally agree with you. there's a cost benefit analysis we make when purchasing something and I can imagine the case where I'm ok paying 50c an hour for a remote game.
It's hard though not to see the writing on the wall in regards to "local compute GPU availability". Every single industry even tangentially related to compute power has "silently" moved their bus model to consumption based, despite the consumer base having 0 appetite for that. (We're not engineers/app developers who are forced to use LLM agents, we're trying to pay a service that hosts games.)
I am unsure how a medium that was a failure as a free/subscription model will succeed as a floating pay-as-you-go model.
For a period of time I would rent a windows box with gpu from aws, install my game, and play it over parsec (a Remote Desktop tool designed for low latency). It was around $0.40/hour for a high-end gaming rig for the ~40 hours I needed to binge my new game. I play new games infrequently, so the cost analysis was “a new computer for $1500, or rent one for the time I need it for $15.”
It’s just a bummer that this process wasn’t a bit easier. I recall there was some setup involved.
It's a positive in the sense that the industry has made it marginally cheaper in time/resources to pay-as-you-go.
It's a positive in the sense that due to these industry changes (computer power going up 20x in cost.), the platforms are offering a way to let us peons play games.
It's a negative in that it's a futher commitment of these vendors to hoarde compute/GPU power from western consumers and chinese LLM vendors.
MS will routinely purchase the highest end GPU for sake of keeping this service alive, nevermind their own LLM. Good luck getting one yourself.
yep, actually in my area this will be cheaper than the gaming cafes people frequent—I think the lack of reasonably-local servers is the main thing that will block adoption.
I'm not so certain the average gamer is well-informed enough to realize what they're giving up, or that they feel strongly enough to take a stand for it if they do. I'm hopeful they will, we'll see.
Seems the important part is that Game Pass included Cloud Gaming. Now, they mostly strip it off (left few hours monthly) and charge it extra. In contrast, Sony still retains unlimited streaming in PS+.
Yup, the input lag is not something I can stomach. Even in pretty optimal network conditions, it's very noticeable. Other people may be less sensitive to it than me, so they may find this to be nice. I do worry about a longer term trend of pushing cloud over local hardware for gaming, which was never something I seriously considered until recently with hardware prices being what they are.
How about someone capitalize on the billions of gigs of video card hardware available in these data centers to render and stream games of unfathomable amount realism?
The divide between those that can own their own consoles and those that are forced to feed the cloud quarter-by-quarter like an old-timey arcade is widening, and this sucks.
Do most people keep their old consoles or do they generally replace them with a newer one? And even if they keep them, do they actually use them or do they end up in the attic? And I guess you could always get one ten years after the release for little money.
I keep every single one and if there’s a game I want to play that I already own I’ll play it on its original console instead of emulating it or buying a remake/remaster. When I have company over everyone has a great time re-discovering the things we loved about them and appreciating the advancements we’ve made. There is something different about passing the controller around between levels on Mega Man X or playing Melee on its original hardware.
> In September, when Microsoft severely limited the game-streaming buffet available to Game Pass subscribers, the company said non-subscribers would soon be able to “purchase cloud playtime hours through the Xbox Store and stream eligible games they own on supported devices.”
Game pass always has been a scam [0] for years and now here we have the ghost of Stadia in Xbox services as streaming games make it into non subscribers.
You will still own nothing, stream everything and be very happy when the game is simulated with a world model.
Yeah, it sucks. These are corporations whose business it is to restrict our freedom. Their software is literal malware meant to pwn our machine and restrict what we can do. Their invasiveness is the least of it.
I advocated so much against it. I was so sad when I saw that virtually nobody cared. It seems games are more important than freedom.
Well, some things are just not meant to be if we are to survive as a healthy society. We had feudalism, asbestos and lead in gasoline. If we could get rid of those, we can get rid of questionable totalitarianism peddling games as well.
Let them stop functioning. Our computing freedom is far more important than video games. If they want to sell us games, they should have to acquiesce to our terms, not the other way around.
Linux with EAC is better than Windows with EAC. A million users on a 95% free OS is better than 100k on a totally free one and 900k on a 0% free. And that's not counting the fact that the free distros you want will continue to exist because not everyone plays online games.
We shouldn't be forced to choose between a free system and one where we can play online games. They should just have to accept the fact they have no control and deal with it. Nobody cares how much it costs them.
If you want to see what happens when you compromise on this, all you have to do is look at mobile operating systems. They're all owned by corporations and governments, and it's enforced by hardware remote attestation. Install a custom system where you're in control? Attestation fails. You're banned from everything, you get no service anywhere, you are ostracized from digital society, you become a second class citizen. Mark my words: one day we will need remote attestation just to connect to the internet.
Not everyone plays online games, but most people need communications apps, banking apps, government apps. Our "free distros" will be nothing but paperweights soon if we don't find a way literally outlaw remote attestation. I think people are really underestimating what's truly at stake here.
You're also free not playing their games. I grew up hosting my own game servers so I'm no stranger to that, but I also enjoy games that are not compatible with that.
It also doesn't really matter if they have kernel stuff or not, unless you game on a different user a user space process can already read all your files and even memory of your processes.
We're also free to hack the games and make them work the way we want. Just like we can install uBlock Origin and kill advertising.
The computers are ours. We are the gods of our digital realms. Their software is running under our control. This "take it or leave it" nonsense doesn't really fly. Adversarial interoperability means there's any number of options available to us.
The notion that people would willingly give up this godlike power just to play online video games without cheaters is one of the saddest ideas I've ever come across. Gamers would reduce our personal computers to consoles without a shred of guilt. I barely have words to express how I feel about that.
Modding and such is fine, even in MP games when expected. But that's not the reason for protections were talking about, cheating is. People are breaking the social contract of competitive games. Booting into a special environment just for competitive games would allow both to coexist.
Not a problem. It's their computer, they can edit the game's memory to freeze their character's hitpoints or look through walls if they really want to. As the owners of the machine, it's their god given right.
> People are breaking the social contract of competitive games.
This is not even remotely close to being worth sacrificing our freedom and leverage over. Let it happen. Play with friends you know and trust instead of internet randoms.
> Booting into a special environment just for competitive games would allow both to coexist.
There will never be such a "special environment" for games. Every government and corporation under the sun wants this for much more sinister reasons. The notion that this will be limited to video games is laughable. Video game are merely how they are selling this subversion to you.
Either your computer is yours or it's not. And if your computer allows strangers to set up an untouchable embassy within your system where they can do anything they want and remain forever beyond your reach, then it's not really your computer, is it? It's the corporation's computer, they're just generously allowing you to use it... Provided you follow their silly policies and rules.
The abuses that will materialize if we allow them to get away with this nonsense will put science fiction to shame.
That's not a thing on the default config of any mainstream distro I'm aware of; everyone restricts attaching a debugger and similar to root by default these days.
I'm sure game companies agree and realize those machines will be excellent clients for their game streaming service.
It probably isn't far off where AAA games are only available via streaming simply because not enough people are willing to buy $1500 consoles and $100+ games.
Even consoles still rely on gamedevs running Windows to do the actual development. No reason steam boxes won't end up as a native target for those same developers, assuming Valve plays their cards right
The two pillars of what made console gaming so enticing for years were cost and convenience. I love my gaming PC, but there is nothing as seamless as sitting on my couch, pressing the middle button on my PlayStation or Xbox, and jumping right back into a game that was in a quick suspend state. Even my PS4 still sees action due to the convenience factor.
Love my steam deck, but the dock/handheld experience isn’t as seamless as switch and flipping from desktop to gaming mode had a like 15% chance of freezing the device until maybe 18-24mo ago. There was also that update issue for years if you left your home network.
Xbox/Switch/Playstation are incredibly reliable and turnkey (and until recently, a low upfront cost). It’s why people turned to them by the millions.
Then they will point to people not buying and blame anyone but themselves lol. I can’t imagine even thinking about the PS6. The PS5 is basically a final fantasy machine. The library is pathetic compared to PS4. And Xbox…come on. Rumors of $1600-$1800 price tag? I built a PC for less. Used to be you couldn’t build a comparable PC for a console’s price until easily 3-4yr into the console cycle.
> open but easy to use devices, like Steam hardware & co widely available
The problem was never the hardware. Consoles and PCs were both a compromise, a trade between convenience, flexibility, price. The easy to use devices from Steam are more console than PC and that's fine. Nobody has a problem with this as long as games run. If the game runs well I don't care about the CPU, RAM, OS, or that I can't upgrade them. I don't spend money on RAM for the sake of plugging things in, I spend it because the system needs it. The Steam Machine is a step towards "consolification" from a PC perspective. The Deck is a true console. So saying "finally consoles are gone" should be more "consoles are dead, long live consoles".
The big problem that only recently got prominence is ownership of the games. Take away the brand loyalty and you'll see that Steam isn't really doing much here. But I care about being able to buy and sell my games, or play them for as long as a compatible system is available. In this regard the Steam store is not much different from console stores. It offers some quality of life features but the core is still missing. It's not my game anymore and this comes with a lot of implications that aren't mitigated by running Linux or having RAM slots.
i find the entire concept alien and i have zero interest in becoming a customer in such models, so i'm not into it and i might be misinterpreting things, but aren't those games you never "bought" in the first place?
i mean, it sounds like it's a subscription plan and some extra session passes added on, not like you actually bought a game at any point, correct me if i'm wrong
No, this explicitly doesn't work for Game Pass. You can only play a selection of games you paid for (or free to play ones).
That means most of the average Xbox user's library is not supported, and if you're paying for Game Pass you almost definitely have a physical Xbox that can stream any game you have installed for free.
This has zero value for players. Streaming can have two business models - you pay a subscription to stream games you already own outside the platform like GeForce Now, or buy on the platform and stream for free like Stadia.
Xbox is charging per hour and making players buy games they already own through Game Pass.
Feels bad to buy an expensive piece of hardware, a $60+ game, and then be asked to pony up another hourly fee to play it on your tablet.
Of course, free game streaming was never a viable business model, so this isn't unexpected, 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.
A lot of big tech companies want to bring back those time because they believe the few decades in between where people owned and controlled their devices and software in a very open computing ecosystem were a mistake. So the aim now is to give you a device you pay for and use but never fully control, and software or media that you rent but never own.
People usually dont - until the levies break, and they do. The PlayStation 4 won its generation, because people left XBox for it, in part, over game sharing (or lack thereof)
So shocking in hindsight how ms never realized this formula as it was happening and let it wither on the vine.
They are not doing super amazing this gen. Reports have them selling 1/3rd the units of PlayStation 5, Game Pass has stalled, they apparently used a JIT manufacturing setup and so were much more affected by the component shortage, so a console that was $500 at launch is now $800.
Funnily enough, because they put in serials into Xbox One games for tracking they did recently launch a really cool disc to digital service that gives the best benefits of physical and digital.
1. Concentrating on Cable (LOL in retrospect, but controlling the living room was always the plan so I get it) 2. Getting rid of physical games
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.
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.
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...
well, unless you want to play some peer to peer multiplayer, then there is a sub you need to pay
Half of all Americans watch more…..
Because they're trying to push a specific narrative.
They want to eliminate that. AIs will open source their games otherwise.
Fixing this requires the end of free personal computing as we know it today. Every computer must become a walled garden. Everything the word "hacker" ever stood for must be destroyed.
And the game industry has continued to grow in spite of rampant piracy for decades, so there's not much to change here other than a slight reduction in the value of console exclusives if they can be easily vibe ported to PC (but the majority of players will play them on console anyway, as is the case with current console platforms that are easily emulated like Switch).
AIs can't open source games, they can only assist in pirating them.
But pirates have historically done a pretty good job without AI.
Existing trends towards games with required online components, subscription-based content and microtransactions will no doubt continue, of course.
Not streaming, other than as an extra-cost option, because the margins on subscriptions and microtransactions are bound to be orders of magnitude higher while providing more value to the majority of players.
AIs should be able to use the same clean room reverse engineering techniques humans use in order to produce a legally clean open source game engine that can use the original game's copyrighted assets.
LLMs are created through mass ingestion of data, and so, by definition, cannot be a clean room. They are trained on the things that they're tasked with copying.
A clean-room implementation is going to be much, much more effort than a "decompilation". Even a decompilation is, I think, more than the hype is claiming. You can't just point at a game, say "decompile it and make it work on Windows" and get a result in one shot. It will take playtesting, cycling around, QA, and time to polish it up. But that will still itself be much easier than an actual clean room implementation. Let alone getting sued by the owner anyhow and having to prove it was clean room in a typical chaotic individual dev environment.
This is legally safe because the spec only described interfaces and had no copyrighted code from the original app. APIs are fair use under Google v Oracle and code that accidentally ends up the same falls under merger doctrine.
They can maybe try and get you on patents but that's easy to avoid by doing it in Europe. Trade secrets don't apply because you reverse engineered the code. The only thing left is good old section 1201.
Of course it's different in practice because these companies have huge legal teams and know where the corpo friendly or tech illiterate judges work. But that's a separate question from is it legal or not.
So at most, vibe ports will marginally lower the value of platform exclusives, and lead to fewer exclusives and/or shorter exclusivity periods.
I, for one, have no problem with this outcome.
Correct, that is why the "to stream games you bought" qualifier exists in the title :)
Looked for a real console and discovered all small shops and big box chains offer Nintendo and PS, none have Xbox. Speaking with managers revealed they or their suppliers "lost" or "ended" contracts to carry it.
Secondary market / used was dirt cheap – good condition consoles for less than a new controller: €35 for Xbox One S, €85 for Xbox Series S.
Smelled like a death spiral well underway.
All the other games I play are 20+ years old and I play in a windows VM.
Edit: Looks like Rockstar did the guy a favour and it was 6000 hours (https://www.nme.com/news/red-dead-redemption-2-stadia-player...)
This is from 2019: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/11/stadia-launch-dev-the...
[0]: https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/
-wake up feeling sick after a late night of playing video games
-excited to play some halo 2k19
-"xbox on"
-...
-"XBOX ON"
-"Please verify that you are "annon332" by saying "Doritos™ Dew™ it right!"
-"Doritos™ Dew™ it right"
-"ERROR! Please drink a verification can"
-reach into my Doritos™ Mountain Dew™ Halo 2k19™ War Chest
-only a few cans left, needed to verify 14 times last night
-still feeling sick from the 14
-force it down and grumble out "mmmm that really hit the spot"
-xbox does nothing
-i attempt to smile
-"Connecting to verification server"
-...
-"Verification complete!"
-finally
-boot up halo 2k19
-finding multiplayer match...
-"ERROR! User attempting to steal online gameplay!"
-my mother just walked in the room
-"Adding another user to your pass, this will be charged to your credit card. Do you accept?"
-"NO!"
-"Console entering lock state!" Nueva Yo -"to unlock drink verification can"
-last can
-"WARNING, OUT OF VERIFICATION CANS, an order has been shipped and charged to your credit card"
-drink half the can, oh god im going to be sick
-pour the last half out the window
-"PIRACY DETECTED! PLEASE COMPLETE THIS ADVERTISEMENT TO CONTINUE"
-the mountain dew ad plays
-i have to dance for it
-feeling so sick
-makes me sing along
-dancing and singing
-"mountain dew is for me and you"
-throw up on my self
-throw up on my tv and entertainment system
-router shorts
-"ERROR NO CONNECTION! XBOX SHUTTING OFF"
-"PLEASE DRINK VERIFICATION CAN TO CONTINUE"
Now, this feels fine with <10ms input latency over wifi. Even in 2026 I'm skeptical about sending my input to Atlanta and back.
Of course you don't need 2x teslas just to stream a game to your living room - a relatively power-efficient streaming box is possible
But what I am definitely afraid of is that they will want to charge games per hour anyway. The talks that consoles will cost 2000 USD is part of it. They don't want you to own things anymore.
You can't buy a house anymore, because they rather buy and keep it to create shortages and make you pay an absurd rent.
We should be talking more about how taxes should fit into this world where they are positioning themselves to not allow people to have things, not even the basic.
For examples, in the housing thing, it should not only have higher taxes for keeping properties empty but also it should be exponential otherwise it will become a cost to people. Making it exponential make it unviable. Also, investment funds should be much more regulated and should require approval for every transaction above a threshold (which imo should be small to close loopholes). This will slow things down enough.
The demand will still exist but companies will fill the gap. We should not be relying on one single investment fund to control your health, housing and employment.
We also should be discussing on closing all the gaps that ultra rich are using to not contribute back to the system they explore. They became leeches/parasites and not putting back the amount they should is causing them to be able to break the system more and more.
The only Pacific way right now is to boy;cott these big fellas. They got to comfortable saying that we are trash and the blame of everything is on us while doing everything they can to not even pay basic rights to employees.
I also think that if you know a trillionaire employee with a white collar, they also should get bit more pressure.
I know someone working in a company which recently caused hundreds of "collateral" deaths, and for him and everyone in the company, it is not their fault they exploded innocent people. We need to put these folks back to reality, because they are the same type of trash as we are, and they don't know it.
Now I guess it is obvious why they have been building so many bunkers lately. They were definitely conspiring.
(Btw, I have a strong feeling that sxai+t might become an investment fund with several companies, but that's another conversation)
And I am using the word conservative in the non-political sense here - opposed to change. The individual motivations are many, but ultimately, a lot of people tend to avoid change around where they live.
In most cities it's developers who are pushing councils/government to rezone land so they can secure additional development sites.
So Ireland made it almost literally illegal to build anything and it sounds like that led to bad behavior? Yes Ireland should fix corruption around building but they should also allow people to build homes.
[1]. https://www.centreforcities.org/reader/a-zoning-system-for-e...
But we've got 4-5 decades of games to enjoy.
Part of the reason that the games industry is struggling is that there's been no real generational leaps for a long time. Gaming used to be driven by those technological leaps, but these days we just get incremental improvements. 10-15yr old games are just as entertaining as brand new releases and often don't look too dated.
Also, ever more people are getting into retro gaming, enjoying the classics from the 80s and 90s, from well before microtransactions and hyper-competitive online multiplayer.
I've had better luck finding great games I didn't know about from the 1990s than from the past twenty years.
If you like 2d platforming exploration types, try Hollowknight, Celeste, VVVVVV, Ori, Animal Well. Each one is fantastic.
Piracy has been present since the advent of the personal computer and I think it's accepted by most that some people will pay, and others just won't. I'm not sure that AI reverse engineering changes this picture.
I think both, I would argue that right now, giving hardware into the hands of your customer presents a much bigger risk nowadays. Streaming is obviously the better option for margins, and now it is basically the only option to keep the product under control. Also now that consumer GPU/memory is getting more and more expensive, I think it has become realistically the only way forward.
Given they're moving to digital-only future I fully expect them to sell a "50$ + monthly subscription" dongle-like version of ps6 and xbox where you can play the game you buy as a streaming solution, or pay the aforementioned price for a "locally hosted" device on a console.
And I'm not sure we're ever going to see cheap RAM or GPUs again. There's clearly more money to be made at current price levels, and not much potential for competition to fix the market.
Why did you have to phrase it like this, instead of just bringing up your own counterpoint?
Also, I'd see the concern here as where the code runs: if there is a dependency on the server to pull down code/assets, but it still runs it locally, then there is still an opportunity to pirate it locally - So this isn't a point about cloud-dependence, but AI/piracy specifically pushing execution to the server side.
Reminds me of the enshittttification of TV where every new system starts off ad free and then adds ads anyways.
It's crazy that after all this time, there still isn't anything that is better than it.
The price seems a little high, as I expect them to be before tax and currency conversion, but mostly I struggle to see who this is for.
https://support.xbox.com/en-US/help/games-apps/cloud-gaming/...
If you're out, on vacation or something, then sure streaming to your phone or tablet makes sense, but you're not going to sign in to a random Smart TV or PC with your Xbox account (at least Microsoft shouldn't encourage that behaviour). That just seems like such a limited use case to me.
https://partner.steamgames.com/pccafe
The problem is that this is the entry point to do more nefarious things later
Companies love to boil the frog - introduce something and later jack up the price or take something else away or something like that
I at least am always weary of new stuff like this
Ultimately, you end up paying for the usage somehow.
and I don't actually think that's substantially different from other competitors, like geforce now
whether I will choose to play it on a different server in the first place is a different question (I won't)
It's hard though not to see the writing on the wall in regards to "local compute GPU availability". Every single industry even tangentially related to compute power has "silently" moved their bus model to consumption based, despite the consumer base having 0 appetite for that. (We're not engineers/app developers who are forced to use LLM agents, we're trying to pay a service that hosts games.)
I am unsure how a medium that was a failure as a free/subscription model will succeed as a floating pay-as-you-go model.
It’s just a bummer that this process wasn’t a bit easier. I recall there was some setup involved.
It's a positive in the sense that due to these industry changes (computer power going up 20x in cost.), the platforms are offering a way to let us peons play games.
It's a negative in that it's a futher commitment of these vendors to hoarde compute/GPU power from western consumers and chinese LLM vendors. MS will routinely purchase the highest end GPU for sake of keeping this service alive, nevermind their own LLM. Good luck getting one yourself.
I'm not so certain the average gamer is well-informed enough to realize what they're giving up, or that they feel strongly enough to take a stand for it if they do. I'm hopeful they will, we'll see.
The divide between those that can own their own consoles and those that are forced to feed the cloud quarter-by-quarter like an old-timey arcade is widening, and this sucks.
I know my N64 has more than 5000 hours on it, and I'm fairly certain it'll still be in working condition when I die.
/s/cloud/rentseekers/
I mean I would never stream a game, but still
Game pass always has been a scam [0] for years and now here we have the ghost of Stadia in Xbox services as streaming games make it into non subscribers.
You will still own nothing, stream everything and be very happy when the game is simulated with a world model.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33362792
I advocated so much against it. I was so sad when I saw that virtually nobody cared. It seems games are more important than freedom.
If you want to see what happens when you compromise on this, all you have to do is look at mobile operating systems. They're all owned by corporations and governments, and it's enforced by hardware remote attestation. Install a custom system where you're in control? Attestation fails. You're banned from everything, you get no service anywhere, you are ostracized from digital society, you become a second class citizen. Mark my words: one day we will need remote attestation just to connect to the internet.
Not everyone plays online games, but most people need communications apps, banking apps, government apps. Our "free distros" will be nothing but paperweights soon if we don't find a way literally outlaw remote attestation. I think people are really underestimating what's truly at stake here.
It also doesn't really matter if they have kernel stuff or not, unless you game on a different user a user space process can already read all your files and even memory of your processes.
The computers are ours. We are the gods of our digital realms. Their software is running under our control. This "take it or leave it" nonsense doesn't really fly. Adversarial interoperability means there's any number of options available to us.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera...
The notion that people would willingly give up this godlike power just to play online video games without cheaters is one of the saddest ideas I've ever come across. Gamers would reduce our personal computers to consoles without a shred of guilt. I barely have words to express how I feel about that.
Not a problem. It's their computer, they can edit the game's memory to freeze their character's hitpoints or look through walls if they really want to. As the owners of the machine, it's their god given right.
> People are breaking the social contract of competitive games.
This is not even remotely close to being worth sacrificing our freedom and leverage over. Let it happen. Play with friends you know and trust instead of internet randoms.
> Booting into a special environment just for competitive games would allow both to coexist.
There will never be such a "special environment" for games. Every government and corporation under the sun wants this for much more sinister reasons. The notion that this will be limited to video games is laughable. Video game are merely how they are selling this subversion to you.
Either your computer is yours or it's not. And if your computer allows strangers to set up an untouchable embassy within your system where they can do anything they want and remain forever beyond your reach, then it's not really your computer, is it? It's the corporation's computer, they're just generously allowing you to use it... Provided you follow their silly policies and rules.
The abuses that will materialize if we allow them to get away with this nonsense will put science fiction to shame.
That's not a thing on the default config of any mainstream distro I'm aware of; everyone restricts attaching a debugger and similar to root by default these days.
But AC is kinda useless on Linux anyway, might as well have none.
It probably isn't far off where AAA games are only available via streaming simply because not enough people are willing to buy $1500 consoles and $100+ games.
As for Valve itself, many probably won't find Valve that great when the new management generation takes over, and is no longer Gabe calling the shots.
Love my steam deck, but the dock/handheld experience isn’t as seamless as switch and flipping from desktop to gaming mode had a like 15% chance of freezing the device until maybe 18-24mo ago. There was also that update issue for years if you left your home network.
Xbox/Switch/Playstation are incredibly reliable and turnkey (and until recently, a low upfront cost). It’s why people turned to them by the millions.
The problem was never the hardware. Consoles and PCs were both a compromise, a trade between convenience, flexibility, price. The easy to use devices from Steam are more console than PC and that's fine. Nobody has a problem with this as long as games run. If the game runs well I don't care about the CPU, RAM, OS, or that I can't upgrade them. I don't spend money on RAM for the sake of plugging things in, I spend it because the system needs it. The Steam Machine is a step towards "consolification" from a PC perspective. The Deck is a true console. So saying "finally consoles are gone" should be more "consoles are dead, long live consoles".
The big problem that only recently got prominence is ownership of the games. Take away the brand loyalty and you'll see that Steam isn't really doing much here. But I care about being able to buy and sell my games, or play them for as long as a compatible system is available. In this regard the Steam store is not much different from console stores. It offers some quality of life features but the core is still missing. It's not my game anymore and this comes with a lot of implications that aren't mitigated by running Linux or having RAM slots.
i mean, it sounds like it's a subscription plan and some extra session passes added on, not like you actually bought a game at any point, correct me if i'm wrong
That means most of the average Xbox user's library is not supported, and if you're paying for Game Pass you almost definitely have a physical Xbox that can stream any game you have installed for free.
This has zero value for players. Streaming can have two business models - you pay a subscription to stream games you already own outside the platform like GeForce Now, or buy on the platform and stream for free like Stadia.
Xbox is charging per hour and making players buy games they already own through Game Pass.
You need to drill a hole into a concrete wall once - you rent the drill. You spend every day drilling countless holes - you buy the drill.
in this case, you're clearly not allocating a device for your sole usage for a given period of time; it's a gaming SAAS, which isn't really renting
I'm unhappy that the Kinect got removed from the Xbox and with this sort of nonsense, I won't be purchasing any sort of replacement from Microsoft.
Anyway...